The Darkest Evening

by Cleeves, Ann

  Holly was thinking how she’d describe her encounter with Josh Heslop when there was a tap at the door and a constable stuck in his head.

  ‘Yes?’ Vera was fierce and irritable. She never liked being interrupted.

  ‘There’s just been a 999 call, boss.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘A worker from the Forestry Commission driving back towards Kirkhill this afternoon. He’s found a dead woman. Not far from Brockburn. They wondered if it could be your missing Miss Browne.’

  ‘And why do we only know about it now?’ Her voice was deceptively calm, her eyes fiery.

  ‘The guy only found the body because his van broke down and he was wandering around trying to get a phone signal. He ended up walking to the road and flagging down a car.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ Vera was already on the way to her office to fetch her coat.

  ‘At the Forestry Commission office in Kirkhill waiting for you.’ The PC ventured a little further into the room and handed over a slip of paper with an address.

  Vera took it, stopped at the door and looked into the room. ‘Joe, you take over here. Let the CSI and Doc Keating know. I’ll give an accurate GPS location when I have one. Continue with the briefing. I want a full report of everything discussed on my desk before you leave tonight.’ A pause. ‘Hol, you’re with me.’

  The forestry officer was Les Robson. He was wiry, one of those outdoor, weather-beaten men it’s impossible to age, still in his uniform green trousers and jersey, a fleece. The commission office was in a wooden building close to Kirkhill community hall. He was sitting at his desk, his hands cupped round a mug of coffee. Holly thought it would take a lot to throw him, but he’d been thrown by this. He looked as if he was planted in his chair and hadn’t moved since he’d got there.

  Vera was uncharacteristically patient. ‘Will you find the place again,’ she asked, ‘in the dark? I wouldn’t blame you if it was a struggle. These commercial plantations all look the same to me.’

  ‘We carry coloured plastic ribbons,’ Robson said, ‘to mark the edge of the clear fell. I tied those to trees as I made my way back to the van. Even in the light I wasn’t sure I’d find my way back.’

  Vera nodded. ‘We’ll need you to come with us. This is your patch. We couldn’t do it without you. Wouldn’t know where to start.’

  He got to his feet and picked up keys from his desk. ‘We can take one of the other vans. Mine’s still out there. It won’t get fixed until tomorrow.’

  ‘No need,’ Vera said. ‘We’ll go in my Land Rover. You can direct me.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He seemed grateful that he didn’t have to drive.

  The three of them squeezed into the bench seat at the front, Holly squashed in the middle. There were still street lights until the edge of the village and then it was perfectly dark. No traffic. No houses. Holly thought she recognized the road and the long wall that marked the entrance to Brockburn, then they took a turn into unknown territory, a lane surrounded by trees, which blocked out even the stars and the moonlight. They came to a barrier and Vera stopped.

  ‘Is this us?’

  Robson didn’t answer. He was out of the vehicle and raising the metal pole that blocked the way. Vera drove through and they waited for the man to join them.

  ‘It’s not locked?’

  ‘No need. Nobody drives here.’ A pause. ‘Walkers come sometimes. It’s a public bridleway and locals grew up playing in the forest. You get riders occasionally.’ There was a steep, sandy track only separated from the trees by boggy ditches, covered in ice, which glittered when the headlights swept over them. A sharp turn, another narrower track and then a small clearing where the green Forestry Commission van still stood.

  ‘It’s a walk from here.’ Robson jumped down first. ‘There’s an area we cleared years ago and seems to have been forgotten. I thought I might get better phone signal away from the trees. The path’s overgrown now. I couldn’t have got my van through and I wouldn’t risk your Land Rover.’

  The air felt sharp and thin, turning their breath white in the torchlight. The only colour was on pink plastic ribbons, strangely celebratory, which marked the route through the forest. The path was rutted and pitted, churned by heavy machinery, the forest already encroaching on either side. Patches of snow lay under the trees. Holly walked easily, only missing her footing occasionally on the uneven ground, but Vera was already wheezing. She stopped for a moment and bent double to catch her breath.

  ‘Is this the only way in?’

  ‘Aye.’ He stood. Holly could tell he was impatient, eager to get this over. ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘You could get a tractor down here, a quad bike?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Vera shone her torch to the ground, looking for recent tyre tracks, but everything was covered by a new sheen of frost. Holly thought the boss wanted an excuse to rest a while longer before they continued. As they walked on, following the trail of the ribbons at junctions and splits in the track, Holly again ran through the women she’d been considering, earlier in the evening, as potential suspects. Would Juliet and Harriet find their way here? Even if they had access to an off-road vehicle? Yet they’d both grown up in the valley. Harriet would have seen the trees planted, watched them grow. She’d know the land beneath the forest. The same was true of the farmers, Rosemary Heslop and Jill Falstone. And of the next generation, the Heslop girls and Josh. This landscape was strange to Holly, but it was probably their playground, a place to explore.

  Holly was wondering how well Dorothy would know it, when they came to a gap in the trees. She stopped in her tracks, stunned by the scene laid out before her. When Robson had spoken of a clearing, she’d imagined a green space, light and grassy, a place for summer picnics.

  This looked more like a war zone, a graveyard, not like the neat and ordered cemetery she saw from the window of her apartment, but a place of twisted limbs, everything dead and dry. The foresters had cut the pines, and stripped them of branches, so only the valuable straight trunks remained to be carried away for sale. Everything else had been discarded, left in heaps, grey now in the moonlight. The bones of the trees thrown into giant piles, the huge roots pulled out by diggers, upturned, so they looked like fingers reaching towards the sky. The area of devastation was huge and the moonlight shone in.

  Vera and Robson would have known what to expect and were unmoved. Vera stood, hands on hips, breathing heavily. Holly thought it was the most exercise she’d had for years. She felt a smug smile crawl across her face.

  ‘Where’s the dead woman then?’ Vera asked.

  ‘This way,’ Robson said. ‘I would never have seen her, but I was clambering round, looking for phone signal, and I almost fell over her.’

  ‘Just stay where you are and point it out to us.’ Vera was her imperious self again.

  He pointed to the far edge of the clear fell. ‘About ten yards in over there.’

  Holly followed Vera. They made their way around the clearing, close to the surrounding trees, a longer distance but much easier than climbing over the piles of branches and roots.

  Robson shouted over to them. ‘I’ve marked it with a ribbon.’ A pause. ‘I think an animal has been at her. A dog maybe. They exercise the hounds up here.’

  Holly, not usually squeamish, thought she would vomit.

  The ribbon was motionless in the still air, and they found her easily once they knew where to look. She’d been pulled a short distance from the forest edge and covered with spindly branches, but a flash of colour showed through. A blue Gore-Tex jacket. Vera leaned over and cleared a few of the branches away so they could see enough to make a positive identification, though Holly thought there was no doubt that this was Constance Browne. She stared out at them. Part of her cheek had been nibbled away, but there was no head wound that Holly could see, no blood and bone. Vera was leaning over her, torch in her hand, muttering to herself.

  ‘Eh, pet, what a place to end up. I think they strangled yo
u. Look at this mark around your neck. What did they use? Not that scarf. A bit of wire or twine? I hope you fought back. Let’s hope for a bit of skin under your nails. Something for us to work with.’

  She shot a quick, defiant look at Holly. ‘Don’t mind me. I always talk to the dead. You get more sense from them than the living most times.’ She straightened and shouted out to Robson. ‘I’d like you and my colleague here to go back to the road in my vehicle. Holly will give directions to my forensic team and the pathologist and when they arrive, could you show them the way? They’ll have their own four-by-four. We’ll give you a lift home then.’

  ‘What about you, boss?’ Holly said. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll stay with her.’ Vera gave a little smile. ‘Keep her company and scare off any other animals that might want to spoil our scene.’

  ‘Would you rather I do it?’

  There was a pause and for a while Holly was afraid Vera might agree.

  ‘Nah,’ she said at last. ‘There’s nothing to fear from the dead. They can’t hurt us. And I owe her. If I’d been more patient when I first went to interview her, asked her the right questions, she’d still be alive. She was killed for the secrets she kept. Besides, you’re fitter than me. I’d show myself up by not keeping pace.’

  Holly didn’t push the point. She could think of nothing worse than waiting here in the dark. She’d started walking back towards Robson when Vera called out to her.

  ‘You’ll find a hip flask in the dash. Best malt saved for special occasions. Bring it back with you. I’ll need warming up by the time you get here.’ She paused for a beat. ‘And I reckon this was a woman who’d understand quality.’

  Holly lifted an arm to show she’d heard and understood, and walked on.

  Chapter Thirty

  VERA WATCHED THE TORCH LIGHTS BOUNCING away until they disappeared. She’d switched hers off. The moon gave all the light she needed. She knew better than to explore the scene before Billy Cartwright got his mitts on it, though she’d already decided this wasn’t where Constance Browne had been killed. The teacher had been brought here, either dragged from the place where Robson had left his van, or driven in a quad bike or tractor. She could have been dragged; she’d been a slight woman, not a peck of fat on her thanks to all that Pilates and healthy eating. She’d more likely been driven, though that didn’t help much with the identity of the murderer. Neil Heslop had been driving a tractor the night he found Lorna Falstone’s body, and his lasses whizzed around the place on quad bikes. Even the big house had a grand four-wheel-drive vehicle that would probably have made it if the driver had more nerve than Vera.

  Vera was angry, and still mumbled under her breath to the frozen woman.

  Chances are you’d never have been found. Left here to rot and to be pulled apart by animals. Leaving us all wondering what had happened to you. All those bairns you taught during your career, thinking you’d just run away and left them.

  Vera had never felt at home in the forest. She liked open spaces and hills. She thought she needed a view across half the county as far as the Cumbrian border, and with the hint of the coast in the opposite direction. The rows of trees, uniform and without character, depressed her.

  Hector had brought her here occasionally, when he was in the middle of his egg-collecting addiction. She saw now that was what it had been. The only order in the chaos of their lives had been the narrow shelves in the case that would have looked more fitting in a museum. He’d displayed the eggs in clutches, as if they were still in the nest. Perhaps that madness had been all about control too, just like poor Lorna Falstone’s attempts to starve herself. It hadn’t been about bragging, showing them off. The only people to see them had been his gang, his partners in crime: John Brace and his cronies. It seemed to Vera now that the beauty of the eggs, the order, the strange friendships, had been all that had held him together through the depression following her mother’s death. Or maybe he’d just been a selfish bastard, with a weird passion for collecting and owning things that would have been better left in the wild.

  Vera couldn’t remember what species he’d been after here in the forest. Treecreeper? Nuthatch? She wished she could remember. She’d been smaller then, and Hector had sent her up a ladder with an empty eggbox to retrieve the bird’s eggs. It had been a glorious spring day and the nest had been caught in a spotlight of sunshine. The eggs had been small, almost jewel-like in their beauty, and briefly she’d understood his obsession. Then fear had taken over, fear that she’d fall, or that she’d end up in prison, because she’d known all along that this was against the law.

  She was sitting on a grassy bank at the edge of the clearing, and she felt the hoar frost seep through her coat and into her bones. If she’d known the night would end up like this, she’d have worn her thermals. Vera’s thoughts wandered back to Constance Browne. The teacher was wearing a weatherproof coat, so it was unlikely she was strangled in her bungalow. She’d been outside somewhere. They’d checked her landline, but there’d been no phone calls that morning. They hadn’t found a mobile. So what had made her leave her breakfast uneaten and rush away to her death? Vera had only met her briefly, but she knew in her bones that Constance hadn’t been a woman for panic, for impulse. There must have been a good reason.

  Vera stood up and stamped her feet, to bring some life back into them. A tawny owl called and was answered further down the valley. Across the debris of dead branches, she saw suddenly a pair of eyes, caught in the moonlight, then there was a scuttering and the animal leapt away. Badger, Vera decided, or insomniac roe deer. The thought made her think of venison, of the casserole in the freezer. She’d thrown it together on one of her days off. Something to do when she wasn’t at work. She realized she was starving, felt in her coat pocket and found a bar of chocolate. Like any explorer she knew the value of emergency rations. She broke off a piece, let it melt in her mouth, and thought she’d never tasted anything so good. She looked at her watch and saw that it was Wednesday.

  She was almost dozing when she saw them coming, the lights through the trees. By now she was freezing and the half-sleep had seemed a survival technique, a way of escaping the misery of the cold. Her brain felt like slush too, half-melted ice, not really functioning. She got to her feet again and almost stumbled, then pulled herself together. No way was she going arse over tit in front of the team. Some bugger would capture the moment on their phone and she’d never live it down.

  Holly was in front, recognizable, even though the white scene suit over her outdoor clothes made her seem bulky. She moved easily over the rough ground, as effortless as the roe deer Vera had surprised earlier. Vera felt a moment of envy. Why did I never look like that, even when I was young? Then decided she hadn’t cared enough to work for it. There were always more important things going on. The latest investigation. Looking after Hector when he’d stopped being able to manage on his own, and the drink had eaten away at his brain. As they got closer, Vera saw that Holly was carrying a little rucksack on her back. Holly set it on the ground near to where Vera had been sitting, took out a thermos, opened it. Vera smelled coffee and warmth and could have kissed her.

  ‘Are you okay, boss?’ Holly handed over the thermos lid filled with liquid. Even with gloves, Vera’s hands were so cold that she almost dropped it.

  ‘I am now.’

  Also in the bag, she found a pack of sandwiches, not shop-bought, a bag of crisps, more chocolate. And the hip flask. Vera took a quick swig, then hid it away. She wasn’t going to share the good stuff with them. Holly wasn’t much of a drinker anyway and it would only be wasted.

  Next came Billy Cartwright and two of his team, then Paul Keating the pathologist. Vera ate the sandwiches and drank the coffee well away from their focus on the heap of dead branches covering Constance Browne, a strange surreal picnic.

  ‘Shall we go back, boss?’ Holly had been hovering, close by. ‘Leave them to it?’

  The area of clear fell was suddenly brought to
life by a series of bright, jerky images. It looked to Vera like an ancient black-and-white film; the CSIs taking their photographs, everything recorded, caught in the flashlights of the cameras.

  ‘Yeah,’ Vera said. She tried to get to her feet but didn’t quite manage it. Holly reached down and took her hand. ‘Why not? We’ll only be in the way.’

  Later, she couldn’t remember that walk back to the Land Rover. It must have been slow because it was two o’clock by the time they got there. Holly must have slowed her pace to match Vera’s, and was there to help her scramble down the frozen, potholed track, which at times felt more like an assault course. By the time they arrived at the posse of vehicles, Vera was wiped out.

  ‘I’ll drive, shall I?’ Holly said. She had the keys in her hand.

  For a moment, Vera was tempted. ‘Nah, bugger off,’ she said. ‘You only want me freezing my arse off again, getting down to lift the barriers.’

  She heaved herself into the seat, switched on the engine and the heat full power, and felt her brain starting to work again. ‘Let’s get some padlocks organized for those barriers. Stop the gawpers and the press driving in. Get on the phone to Joe, tell him to get it sorted as soon as.’

  ‘Won’t he be asleep?’

  ‘If he is, wake him up! The idle bugger’s been in the warm all night. Fill him in with all we know. Let’s get this investigation under way. I’ll drop you at the station for your car, then we can both get home for a hot bath and a couple of hours’ shut-eye. We’ll put the briefing back for an hour to give the forensic-science team some time to see the wood from the trees . . .’ Vera gave a chortle. Holly joined in. Vera felt a moment of triumph. Usually Hol saw it as a point of honour not to laugh at her jokes. ‘Tell everyone to be there at nine. Sharp.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  JOE HADN’T BEEN IN BED WHEN Holly called, though he was dozing, in the armchair downstairs, covered by a fancy throw that Sal had bought to keep the new sofa clean. He thought Vera should have taken him to the crime scene with her. He wasn’t sexist, but some situations were best dealt with by a man.