The Stone Circle: The Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries 11

by Elly Griffiths

  Ruth realises that she too is naked and grabs her dressing gown. It’s seven a.m.; soon Kate will come bounding in babbling about school and asking Ruth to do her hair in a French plait. She must head her off. Kate knows and likes Frank but the sight of him in Ruth’s bed would raise questions that Ruth is not yet prepared to answer. What happened last night? She doesn’t remember much beyond Frank saying ‘Ruth’ and leaning in to kiss her. She remembers that she had been dimly worried about smelling of chow mein but soon that had been buried with all the other everyday concerns, drowned out by her overwhelming need for someone to hold, someone to make her forget Nelson going back to his newborn baby, someone to make her forget that she is nearly fifty and, in the Bronze Age, would probably have already been dead for twenty-odd years.

  And it had been great, Ruth remembers, as she pads out onto the landing to forestall Kate. The sex had been fun and tender and unembarrassing; the best she could hope for from someone who isn’t Nelson. Flint is waiting outside the door, looking at her accusingly. ‘Don’t you start,’ says Ruth.

  She opens the door of Kate’s room. Her daughter is still asleep, her face stern in repose, her cuddly toys arranged in a neat line by the wall.

  ‘Time to get up, Kate,’ says Ruth. ‘Your uniform’s on the radiator.’

  Kate is awake immediately, one of the perks of being seven and not forty-seven.

  ‘I’ve got PE today,’ she says. ‘We’re going to play dodgeball.’

  Ruth has no idea what that is but she quails at the thought of retrieving Kate’s PE kit from the laundry basket. ‘I’ll put your kit in a bag,’ she says.

  ‘The pink bag with Hello Kitty on it.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can find.’

  Ruth has a lightning shower and then goes back to her room. Frank is awake, rubbing his eyes. ‘Hi, baby,’ he says to Ruth. Baby? What’s happened to them?

  ‘I must get dressed,’ says Ruth. ‘Kate and I need to leave at eight.’

  ‘Do you want me to lie low up here?’ says Frank, understanding at once.

  ‘Please,’ says Ruth, searching vainly for a clean top. She has a lecture at ten and doesn’t want to look more than usually untidy.

  By the time that Kate is up and dressed, the hastily ironed kit in the Hello Kitty bag, untidy French plait completed and breakfast made, Ruth feels slightly calmer. If they can get out of the house without Kate seeing Frank then all will be well. Ruth packs her lecture notes in her backpack and notices the letter, still in its evidence bag. Nelson must have forgotten to take it last night. She puts it in her desk drawer. Thought for the Day is on the radio, which means it’s nearly time to leave.

  ‘Have a last-minute wee,’ she tells Kate. ‘Use the downstairs one.’

  Ruth puts on her coat and gets Kate’s anorak, hat and scarf ready. It’s still very cold outside in the mornings, the frost glittering on the window panes.

  ‘I want to say goodbye to Flint,’ says Kate, putting on her gloves.

  ‘I think he’s outside,’ says Ruth. ‘We’ll probably see him in the garden.’

  They make it to the car without incident. Frank’s car is parked in front of the weekenders’ cottage so Ruth hopes that Kate won’t notice it. Ruth scrapes her windscreen with her gym membership card. It’s the most use it ever gets. Then she climbs in and starts the engine, the hot air dispersing the last flakes of ice.

  ‘Let’s go disco,’ says Ruth, revealing her age.

  ‘There’s a man at your bedroom window,’ says Kate informatively.

  Chapter 16

  John Mostyn has no known next-of-kin so Nelson applies for a warrant to search his house. When it arrives Judy and Clough drive to the estate in King’s Lynn. As soon as they park in front of the pebbledash house they know that something is wrong. The front door is open, swinging gently on its hinges.

  ‘Keep behind me,’ says Clough, as they approach.

  Judy ignores him. She hates it when Clough gets into one of his Jack Reacher moods. She pushes past him, although she is careful to put on gloves before touching the door.

  There are bloodstains in the hall and, in the crowded front room, a bullet hole in the back of the sofa, where Mostyn must have been sitting when he was shot.

  ‘This is the crime scene,’ says Clough, getting out his phone to call the station.

  ‘No sign of a struggle,’ says Judy, looking round the room.

  ‘How could you tell?’ says Clough.

  But, in fact, it is easy to see that the fragile towers of cardboard boxes haven’t been disturbed. There’s a narrow channel from door to sofa and both victim and murderer must have travelled the same way. Clough peers at the faded green chenille of the sofa.

  ‘Bullet’s not in there. Murderer must have pocketed it.’

  ‘The boss said it looked like a professional job,’ says Judy. ‘Looks like Mostyn was just sitting on the sofa when someone burst in and shot him dead.’

  ‘The door was kicked in,’ says Clough. ‘But the wood was rotten. It wouldn’t have taken much force.’

  Judy looks at the sofa. There’s a dull red stain and a scorch mark where the bullet entered the fabric. Not much blood though. The killer had known exactly where to shoot. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘we’d better leave this room before we contaminate it any further.’

  They retreat to the kitchen where the hamsters are on their hind legs in their cage as if they know something is wrong.

  ‘Poor things,’ says Judy. ‘We’ll have to find a home for them. Would Cassie like them? Make nice pets for Spencer.’

  ‘You must be joking,’ says Clough. ‘Cassie hates mice. And Dexter would eat them.’ Dexter is Clough’s dog, a bulldog puppy. Cassie is his wife and Spencer his one-year-old son.

  Judy looks round the kitchen. There are some signs of order in here, some vestiges of a daily routine. John Mostyn seemed to have lived on tinned soups; they are lined up on the worktop: mulligatawny, oxtail, pea and ham – flavours Judy did not know still existed. His bowl, spoon and cup are washed up on the draining board. He grew herbs in pots on the window sill and has a 1992 ‘Beaches of Norfolk’ calendar on the wall showing February, Hunstanton. He obviously sat at the kitchen table to read and to watch a small colour television balanced on a pile of children’s encyclopaedias. Judy examines some of the paperbacks ranged around the chair.

  ‘Clough!’

  ‘What?’ Clough is looking out of the window for the SOC team.

  Judy points to the books. The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot. The Four Quartets. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The Good News Bible. The Sunday Hymnal. The Enthusiast’s Guide to Pagan Festivals. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

  Clough shifts some of the papers on the table.

  ‘Look at this.’

  It’s a typed letter.

  DCI Nelson,

  You have found Margaret but this is only the beginning. It is the best of times and the worst of times. You must finish what you have started. Courage, my friend. Remember we know not the day nor the hour . . .

  ‘It’s not finished,’ says Judy.

  ‘Why print out an unfinished letter?’ says Clough. ‘Mind you, there’s no printer. No computer either.’

  But, under a pile of BBC cookery magazines, they find a laptop, only a few years old by the looks of it. There’s a printer too.

  ‘We should seize the laptop,’ says Judy. She takes a plastic bag from one of the many bags that are full of them and carefully slides the slim computer inside. The forensics team arrive and start to erect an awning over the front door. ‘One way in, one way out,’ that’s the rule. The house is suddenly full of people in white coveralls.

  ‘We’d better get back to the station,’ says Clough.

  ‘I’m taking the hamsters with me,’ says Judy.

  *

  ‘So John Mostyn was killed by someone who broke into his house, shot him at close range and then drove the body some three miles to leave it in an industrial estate.’ In the brie
fing room, Nelson is rattling through the facts with his usual deadpan delivery. Judy, Tanya and Clough watch him. In the background, the hamsters run wildly on their wheel.

  ‘We might get some CCTV from the Canada Estate,’ says Nelson. ‘It’s quite a way from the car park to the fountain.’

  ‘And someone may have seen or heard the killer breaking into Mostyn’s house,’ says Clough. ‘It was probably pretty late at night though.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ says Judy. ‘After all, he was sitting on the sofa and not in bed.’

  ‘He probably slept in there,’ says Clough. ‘I think I saw a sleeping bag.’

  ‘He was sitting upright,’ says Judy.

  ‘Watching TV?’ suggests Tanya. ‘DIY SOS was on last night.’

  ‘The TV was in the kitchen,’ says Judy. ‘And I don’t think that he was much of a DIY fan.’

  ‘We’ll have to see what the SOC team finds at the house,’ says Nelson. ‘And we need to ask why the killer took the body to the Canada Estate. Surely it would have been easier just to leave it in the house?’

  ‘Maybe they just wanted to distract us,’ says Clough. ‘Misdirection, like in magic tricks.’ Clough rather fancies himself as a magician and, after a few beers, is prone to trying to do a trick with empty glasses and a pound coin.

  ‘I think the location itself might be important,’ says Nelson. ‘The plaza was a circle surrounded by buildings. It’s a kind of stone circle.’

  He looks slightly embarrassed to be voicing such a Cathbad-esque thought but Judy is impressed. The boss is right, there was something rather symbolic about the placing of the body, the shuttered buildings, the empty fountain.

  ‘But if Mostyn wrote the letters,’ says Tanya, ‘he was the one who was obsessed with stone circles.’

  ‘Maybe someone else knew about the letters,’ says Nelson. ‘Remind us what the letter said, Judy, the half-finished one you found in the house.’

  Judy has given the letter to Forensics but she has a photo on her phone. She reads the words aloud. ‘“DCI Nelson, You have found Margaret but this is only the beginning. It is the best of times and the worst of times. You must finish what you have started. Courage, my friend. Remember we know not the day nor the hour . . .”’

  ‘It certainly sounds like the other ones,’ says Nelson. ‘“Best of times” is a quote, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities,’ says Judy. ‘By Charles Dickens. I looked it up.’

  ‘What about “we know not the day nor the hour”?’

  ‘It’s from Matthew’s gospel. “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.” I think it’s about being ready for the Second Coming.’

  ‘Mostyn certainly wasn’t ready,’ says Clough. ‘He can’t have expected someone to burst into his house and shoot him dead.’

  ‘Maybe that’s exactly what he did expect,’ says Nelson. ‘Maybe he knew that someone was coming after him. Finding Margaret’s bones must have stirred up lots of memories and he was the key suspect at the time. We should have offered him police protection.’

  ‘We offered to take him into the station yesterday,’ says Clough, bristling slightly. ‘But he said he wanted to make his own way.’

  ‘Because he was scared,’ says Judy. ‘He said that he and his mother had suffered abuse when Margaret first went missing.’

  ‘So who would have wanted him dead?’ says Nelson. ‘Someone who thinks – or knows – that he killed Margaret?’

  Judy thinks that, despite his low-key manner, the boss is actually relishing being involved in a murder case again. Tanya and Clough too seem galvanised at the thought of a dead body. For her part, thinking of the tins of soup and the ‘Beaches of Norfolk’ calendar, she just feels rather sad. She must be losing her edge.

  ‘If Mostyn wrote the letters,’ she says, ‘he wanted us to find Margaret. Why would he do that if he was the one who had killed her in the first place?’

  ‘Maybe his conscience was bothering him,’ says Clough. ‘And how did he know where she was buried if he wasn’t the one that killed her?’

  ‘Remember Ruth thinks that the body was moved,’ says Judy. ‘So Mostyn might not have been the one who originally buried her. He might have known who it was though.’

  ‘He knew too damn much for my liking,’ says Nelson. ‘About Lucy, about the original letters, where Margaret was buried. Maybe he knew too much for someone else’s liking. Well, we’ll know more when we hear from the geeks.’ He means the Computer Forensics team, currently examining Mostyn’s laptop. Judy wonders if she should make a point by pretending that she doesn’t understand the term but decides that it’s not worth the hassle.

  ‘What about Margaret’s family?’ says Tanya. ‘I’m seeing Luke, the brother, later today. I’m going up to London,’ she adds, rather importantly.

  ‘The streets aren’t paved with gold, you know,’ says Judy.

  Tanya ignores her.

  ‘Margaret’s father, Bob, was a suspect too,’ says Clough. ‘Maybe Mostyn knew that Bob had done it and someone killed him to keep him quiet.’

  ‘Yes, but why now?’ says Nelson. ‘Mostyn had thirty years to inform on Bob Lacey. If he was intimidated, surely he could have spoken up after Bob died? But we can’t ignore the possibility that the same person killed Mostyn and Margaret. We should keep looking at the original case, at least until we get the DNA results back from the remains. Judy, where are we with Margaret’s friends and family?’

  ‘I spoke to Kim Jennings,’ says Judy. ‘I thought I’d speak to her parents too. The two families were close and Karen’s second husband is Kim’s uncle. I’ve tracked down Margaret’s English teacher, Carol Dunne. She’s a headteacher now. I though she might have some useful insights.’

  ‘Good idea,’ says Nelson. ‘Talk to the sister, Annie, too. Cloughie, you liaise with the Forensics team and find out about CCTV. Judy, we need to tell Karen today about Mostyn, prepare her for the media making the link with Margaret. We’ve got about a day before this hits the press.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ says Clough. ‘I saw Judy’s stepdaughter outside just now. She must know something’s going on.’

  ‘That girl’s as much trouble as her father,’ says Nelson. ‘Judy, can you talk to her?’

  ‘I haven’t got any influence over Maddie,’ says Judy. ‘Or Cathbad, for that matter. I suppose we could offer her an exclusive if she keeps quiet for twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Good idea,’ says Nelson. ‘Though I can’t imagine any relative of Cathbad’s keeping quiet for that long.’

  He’s forgotten that my children are Cathbad’s too, thinks Judy. But she too often finds it hard to remember that they are related to Maddie.

  Chapter 17

  ‘What do you mean, he’s dead?’ asks Karen Benson. ‘Did he have a heart attack or something?’

  Judy and Clough look at each other. They don’t want to release too many details about Mostyn’s death but Karen deserves to know some of the truth. Besides, it will be in the papers tomorrow.

  ‘We are treating his death as suspicious,’ says Judy, falling back on police-speak. ‘I must ask you to keep this to yourself for the time being. We’ll make a statement tomorrow.’

  ‘Suspicious?’ Pete Benson who, as usual, is sitting quietly by his wife’s side, speaks up for the first time. ‘Does this mean that he was murdered?’

  ‘It’s an ongoing investigation,’ says Clough and, to Judy’s irritation, once again husband and wife both turn to him as if the oracle has spoken. ‘We just wanted to prepare you because, when this hits the press, people will remember that Mostyn was originally questioned about Margaret’s disappearance.’

  Karen looks up at Margaret’s picture on the wall, something that she does, almost unconsciously, every few minutes.

  ‘I never thought he did it, you know,’ she says. ‘People were quick to point the finger at John because he was a bit odd but I always thought he was harmless. I cou
ldn’t have gone on living near if I thought he’d killed her.’

  ‘I saw him a few weeks ago,’ says Pete. ‘We talked about gardening.’

  ‘Was he interested in gardening?’ asks Judy, thinking of the overgrown wilderness at Allenby Avenue.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Pete. ‘Stones were his thing. He liked collecting stones.’

  Judy thinks of the hag stone that was her gift from Mostyn. It’s still in her bag, warding off evil. She too hadn’t thought that Mostyn seemed like a killer. But, as the boss had said, he certainly knew too much.

  ‘Why did people suspect John of being involved with Margaret’s disappearance?’ asks Judy.

  ‘I think just because he was odd,’ says Pete. ‘And he was seen talking to the girls that day.’

  ‘He was talking to everyone,’ says Karen. ‘He’d found a fossilised sea urchin or some such thing.’

  ‘Sea urchin?’ says Judy. ‘A shepherd’s crown?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Karen, looking confused. ‘A sea urchin’s the name I remember. I can picture it now. A grey stone with a sort of star-shape in it.’

  ‘You don’t remember a seahorse at all?’ says Judy. Clough looks at her quizzically.

  ‘No,’ says Karen. ‘I just remember John going round with this sea urchin thing. He showed it to the girls and he showed it to me too. Then, later on, I remember him sitting with his mother, Heidi, at one of the long tables. John was devoted to Heidi. He looked after her so well, took her everywhere. She was in a wheelchair, you see. A nice lady. She could be sharp-tongued but she had a good heart.’

  And Heidi had been John’s most stalwart advocate, thinks Judy, giving him an alibi that even the dinosaur Superintendent Roy Brown hadn’t been able to shake. She wonders what it was like for Mostyn after his mother died. Did he feel any sense of freedom or was he scared, all alone without his champion? At any rate, he’d stayed in the same house, letting the clutter silt up around him.

  ‘Was John Mostyn with his mother all afternoon?’ asks Clough.

  ‘I think so,’ says Karen. ‘But I’ve been asked this so many times. What happened that afternoon, when I last saw Margaret, what time I told Bob, where Annie and Luke were. And I’ve tried to remember everything, I’ve written down times, drawn maps, but there are parts that are still a blur. I think John was with his mother all afternoon but I can’t be certain.’