The Darkest Evening

by Cleeves, Ann

  Holly took advantage of Vera’s pause to stick up her hand and speak. ‘A couple of the party guests had links with the hospital. Sophie and Paul Blackstock. Sophie ran drama workshops for the patients – some sort of therapy – and Paul’s brother Nat was a patient. He died several months later.’

  Vera nodded. Holly had passed on the information the day before, excited by the connection. Vera couldn’t quite see that it was important after all this time, but of course it had to be followed up. ‘They live in Tynemouth. Joe, can you go this afternoon? See if they have any more information about Lorna and if they’ve seen her since.’

  Joe nodded. Holly seemed put out. She’d feel more at home in the smart coastal village of Tynemouth than in the Northumberland hills.

  ‘What about the other two couples who were overnight guests? Any links to the murdered lass?’

  ‘None that they’re admitting to,’ Joe said, ‘and I can’t see that they could have killed her. They were with the others the whole evening, apart for a few minutes to use the bathroom. Sophie and Paul Blackstock took themselves off for longer just before dinner – they’ve got a new bairn and they wanted to talk to the babysitter. Juliet let them use the phone extension in her bedroom, because they had no mobile signal in the house, but it would have been a stretch to go outside, kill Lorna and then come back. It’s not as if they’d been dressed for it.’

  Vera thought about that. ‘We’ll be checking the Brockburn phone records anyway. Let’s just make sure that’s what they were up to when they disappeared from the rest of the group.’

  She looked back at the faces turned towards her and continued. ‘There’ve been rumours that the husband of Harriet and father of Juliet, Crispin Stanhope, who died a few years ago, had a number of affairs in the village. It seems possible that Mark Bolitho has been continuing the tradition. It would be interesting to know if Lorna Falstone was one of Mr Bolitho’s conquests. Let’s make some discreet enquiries. No need to wreck a marriage unless we’re forced to.’ Another pause to check she still had their attention before she went on.

  ‘Lorna was a single mum. Her little boy Thomas was strapped into his car seat, but the vehicle had skidded off the road. It belonged to retired headmistress Constance Browne and had been taken without her knowledge. Not stolen. She wanted us to know that. They had an arrangement and Lorna was allowed to borrow the car when she needed it. The father of the little boy remains a mystery. We need to track down a name. The registrar won’t be working today, but first thing tomorrow, let’s see if there’s anything on the baby’s birth certificate, any clue that might give us a link to Bolitho.’

  Once more, Vera paused. ‘The body was found in the grounds of Brockburn, a big house belonging to a family called Stanhope.’ There were a few giggles. ‘And yes, they are relatives, but only distant and I haven’t seen them for years so I don’t see any conflict of interest.’ Another pause. ‘Anyone got any problem with that?’

  No response.

  ‘Joe here’s been to see Lorna’s parents. What did you make of them?’ She thought they’d all be sick of her voice by now and it was time someone else did some speaking.

  He stood up. One time he’d have been a bit nervous giving any kind of opinion, but he’d gained in confidence. Vera thought that was down to her. She’d trained him well.

  ‘I thought the father seemed cold, a bit distant,’ Joe said. ‘I was there with the social worker, when she was handing over their grandson. Their daughter had just died and this little scrap was all that was left of her. But Robert just took himself off when we arrived. Maybe it was just too much for him and he wouldn’t want strangers to see him emotional.’

  Vera ignored that. ‘And the mother?’

  ‘There was a lot of guilt there. Like you said, Lorna had an eating disorder and they hadn’t done anything about it until it was almost too late. The mother, Jill, had kept in touch with Lorna but always felt the need to handle her carefully. No prying questions. They didn’t speak for a while and Jill was worried about losing her again.’

  ‘So, Lorna’s mother had no idea who the child’s father might be?’ Vera tried to imagine again why the dead young woman might have been so keen to keep the man’s identity to herself. Could it just be that she needed secrets to feel in control of her life once she’d started eating again? She looked out at the room. ‘So that’s the first priority. We have to find the man and at the moment Bolitho is prime suspect as lover or father.’ She paused for a moment before shaking her head. ‘I’m not sure I see him as capable of it, though. This looks like rage. She was hit over the head where she was found, according to Keating. I think she must have been chased from the car. I can’t see her leaving the child on its own with the door open otherwise. And, anyway, could Bolitho have left the big house, battered the lass to death, and then gone back to the party? Even if he’d managed not to get blood on his clothing, he’d surely not have been in the mood to have intellectual conversation over dinner.’

  Vera tried to put herself in the dead woman’s head and wondered if the car had been shunted from the road. Though she hadn’t seen any damage, she hadn’t looked closely. That could explain some details of the scenario. Perhaps Lorna had got out and run, heading for the nearest house. She must have been terrified if she hadn’t even stopped to shut the door.

  Surely that meant she’d known the person who had chased her, been scared from the beginning, because a simple bump in the snow wouldn’t provoke that kind of flight. You’d just talk, wouldn’t you? Exchange phone numbers and insurance details? Vera imagined the effort, the exhaustion and the panic as the slight young woman had run up the hill, seen the lights of the big house and headed towards it. But the shortest route would have been via the track to the back of the house, where she’d been found, and that would have taken her past Dorothy and Karan’s cottage. Why hadn’t she stopped there? Karan had claimed to be in all evening and there’d have been lights on, so why hadn’t she banged on the door, demanding sanctuary?

  Vera was aware that the people in the room were staring at her. She must seem like a gaga old woman, standing there, lost in thought. Frozen. But she needed to go over these details again in her head. This was important.

  Vera shook her head once more to clear her mind of the dark night, the panic, the ice, and turned back to the room. ‘Holly, you chatted to Juliet’s husband Mark Bolitho. What can you tell us? Do you think he’s capable of murdering a young woman?’

  Holly stood up. The young detective was a mystery to Vera: always so cool, so immaculately dressed. Her private life never spoken of. If she had any kind of private life.

  ‘Bolitho grew up in Newcastle, went to university in Durham and came home to do an MA in theatre at Northumbria. He wrote and directed an independent film that did very well here and in the US, and he ended up as Creative Director at the Live, down on the quayside in Newcastle. He and Juliet married three years ago. He still works at the Live and spends a couple of days a week in the city. He’s kept a small flat there.’ Holly paused.

  Vera thought this was all very well but she could have Googled the information herself. ‘Go on, Hol.’

  ‘His big plan is to bring theatre to Brockburn. He talks about the importance of arts for rural areas, but admits that his main motivation is to provide an income to maintain the big house. The party on Friday night was a way of tapping his arty and business friends for donations.’ Another pause. ‘He says that he’d never met Lorna Falstone.’ She looked up at them. ‘Really, I believed him. He might live in Brockburn, but I had the sense that all his work and his friends are still in the city.’

  ‘Could he have killed Lorna?’

  ‘It depends on time of death, but, like you, I really don’t think so. Guests started arriving mid-afternoon because of the weather and they were mostly people that he knew, so he did all the meet-and-greet and schmoozing. He could have slipped away, but it seems very unlikely.’

  Vera took a moment to consider this. ‘B
olitho might not be the killer, but he still might be the father of Lorna’s child. We need to confirm that either way to save ourselves a wild-goose chase after the other men she knew.’ A pause. ‘You spoke to Dorothy and her partner last night, Hol. What did you make of them?’

  ‘I thought they were lovely,’ Holly said. Vera was surprised by the warmth in her voice; Holly was usually such a cold fish. ‘They seem like a happy couple who’ve made the decision that they want a simpler life. So, a few months ago, she gave up her career in the law and he stopped being an accountant and they came to live in the country with their son. Juliet was an old schoolfriend and she gave Dorothy the cottage. A tied cottage that goes with the job of housekeeper. The couple are hoping to buy it eventually if the family will agree. They definitely see their long-term future there. Karan is going to start a post-graduate teaching course in September. He’s become friendly with Connie Browne.’

  ‘That’s the woman who owned the car.’ The names were all up on the whiteboard, but Vera wanted to make sure the whole team understood. ‘Perhaps that’s just a coincidence though. A community like that, everyone knows each other. It’s not on the tourist route, too far from Hadrian’s Wall, the coast or the Pennine Way to attract visitors.’ And that’s just as I like it.

  ‘It did seem odd then,’ Holly went on, ‘that neither Dorothy nor Karan admitted to knowing Lorna. You’d have thought they’d at least have heard of her.’

  ‘You think they’re hiding something?’

  Holly shrugged. ‘Maybe. Or perhaps I was just getting a bit hypersensitive.’

  ‘Eh, pet,’ Vera smiled, ‘that’s just what we need at the start of a case like this.’ A pause. ‘Did either of them see or hear anything on Friday?’

  ‘They claim not. Karan Pabla was in all day after a quick trip to the shops in the morning.’

  And the man on his own in the cottage with the bairn surely would have heard a young woman, banging on the door screaming in panic. Vera still couldn’t understand how the woman wouldn’t have stopped at the first house she came to. Did that mean she wasn’t being chased? That she was heading to the big house because she knew the family and was attacked in the grounds just as she was getting there? It was possible that Vera was making too much of the open car door. It was too soon to get hung up on the details.

  ‘Actions for today. Joe, after you’ve spoken to the Blackstocks, I’d like you to check out the clinic where Lorna was treated for the eating disorder. They might have a record of the people who visited her and I want to understand more about it. I always thought it was tricky for sufferers of anorexia to get pregnant, but I don’t want to rely on guesswork and myth. Holly and Charlie, let’s have you back in Kirkhill, canvassing the neighbours. Sunday lunchtime, there’ll be a few old boys in the pub having a pint before their Sunday lunch. That’ll be for you, Charlie. Get them chatting. We want all the gossip about the Falstones.’

  Vera looked around her. ‘The rest of you, the important things. Facts. Chase up the technicians who are working on the car. There won’t be CCTV on the roads around Brockburn but there might be in Kirkhill, and there are speed cameras on the road out of the village. There’s a chance they might have picked up the car Lorna was driving. And I want to know where Lorna was on the day before she died. She went somewhere on her own on the Thursday morning because she asked Connie to babysit. It was a last-minute thing so it might have been urgent. A GP’s appointment? A meeting with the baby’s dad that might have triggered the events of the following day?’

  ‘What about you?’ Holly. Cheeky mare. She added too late, ‘Boss. Where will you be?’

  ‘Me?’ Vera gave her one of her special smiles. ‘I’ll be back at my ancestral home.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  VERA WANTED TO RETRACE HER JOURNEY of Friday night in the light. The weather was grey and gloomy and there were sharp bursts of hail that rattled on the windscreen of the Land Rover like the spatter of shotgun pellets, but at least she could see where she was going. She parked close to where Connie’s car had been. The lay-by where it had ended up was no more than an entrance to a field gate, muddy and pocked with puddles. Shards of ice still floated on the water and blades of discoloured grass poked through the patches of snow.

  She’d realized quite clearly driving here where she’d taken the wrong road in the blizzard. There were two right turns very close to each other and she’d missed the first, the road not taken, which would have led her home. On the opposite side of the road to the gate, the forest came almost to the side of the road, the trees thick and tall, but here, where the car had been, there was open farmland, surrounded by a drystone wall. Vera thought now that car might have ended up there by design rather than accident. She had assumed it had skidded off the road, but it was impossible to tell if that was the case.

  She climbed out of the Land Rover and stood for a moment, looking across the field to the valley. There was a view to the big house. Brockburn was looking very grand at this distance with its pillars, its symmetry and its extensive parkland. It was too far away to see the crumbling stone and peeling paint. In a blizzard, Vera suspected, even the lights would be hardly visible; she’d seen something there, but had thought it marked the edge of Kirkhill village. Lorna must have known where she was going. It would surely be too much of a coincidence for both of them to have taken the wrong road and ended up in the same place. Vera left her Land Rover where it was and started to walk.

  On the Friday evening she’d driven up the hill until she came to the crossroads with the signpost to Kirkhill. That road had taken her in a wide semicircle to the main entrance of the big house. She saw now that only a couple of hundred yards from the parked Land Rover was the track that led to the back entrance to Brockburn. It was very narrow and hidden by a spinney of bare deciduous trees, in the upper branches an old rookery: large, untidy nests spilling twigs. Two cottages were tucked behind the spinney; in one of these lived Dorothy Felling and Karan Pabla. Vera stood at the junction. In the dark and a blizzard, she would have missed it. She felt a moment of guilt.

  If I’d been more careful, I would have seen the turning. I might have caught up with the lass before she was killed. Instead, I was intent on getting warm and out of the weather. When a young woman was being attacked, I might have been chatting to Juliet and drinking tea.

  Vera turned down the track, which was sunk between two steep banks. It was more sheltered here, the wind broken by the trees. The ground beside the lane flattened and she reached the cottages, which were low, single storey, stone, with small front gardens and a longer strip at the back leading on to a field full of sheep, the only boundary a rickety wire-mesh fence held up by wooden posts. Vera wondered who farmed this land. Not the Falstones. They were on the other side of the valley. Perhaps the tenant was Neil Heslop, the father of the lasses who’d helped out at the dinner on the Friday night. The first cottage was blank, dead-eyed, the windows misted. This must be the holiday home. In the back garden of the attached cottage, she saw a small child’s swing, a hen run, evidence of gardening: some frosted sprout stalks and leeks gone to seed. No sign of life inside though and no car parked outside. In a place like this you would need a car. She stopped by the small gate and listened for a child, music, voices, but everything was quiet.

  Vera hesitated outside for a moment, tempted to go in and snoop. Somewhere like this, they’d likely not be too bothered about security and the door might be open. She was driven by curiosity, not by any sense that the couple might be guilty of Lorna’s murder. Holly might have suspected that they had secrets, but the constable’s description of them didn’t suggest hidden rage or a need for revenge, and the attack on Lorna had been brutal and violent. They were outsiders and this felt like an insider’s crime.

  In the end Vera heard Joe Ashworth’s disapproving voice in her head warning her against intruding – he’d never been a rule-breaker – and she walked on. She was pleased that she’d listened to his unspoken advice, because just
as she passed the cottage there was the sound of an engine coming towards her and a quad bike with a collie perched next to the driver emerged round a bend in the track. It would have been embarrassing to be caught breaking into a witness’s home. The driver was slight, but wrapped in a heavy jacket on top of blue padded overalls, a knitted hat pulled low over the face. It was only when the quad pulled to a stop that Vera recognized one of the young women who’d acted as waitresses at the dinner on the night Lorna was killed.

  ‘Can you switch that thing off for a moment?’ Vera was yelling over the engine sound and the collie was barking.

  There was sudden silence apart from rooks in the distance.

  ‘I’m Vera Stanhope, investigating Lorna’s murder.’

  The girl nodded. ‘Nettie Heslop.’

  ‘Aye, I met you at the big house Friday night. Are you the younger or the older daughter?’ Vera thought they’d looked similar and it’d been hard to age them. She didn’t bump into teenage lasses often enough to tell, only ones dressed up to the nines on a Saturday night in the Bigg Market in Newcastle and they all tried to look older than they were.

  ‘The oldest. Cath will be seventeen next week. I’m eighteen.’

  ‘You’re both at the high school in Kimmerston?’