‘Right,’ she said. ‘Post-mortem findings?’
‘Cause of death was a head injury caused by the copestone from the top of the wall—’
‘I know what a copestone is, Mike.’
He grinned at her. ‘I missed your acid wit, Jo.’
She was tempted to punch him but he was doing a good job. It was more appropriate to listen.
‘As I said, the head injury was caused by the copestone making contact with the back of his skull.’
‘It could have been an accident.’
Korpanski shook his head. ‘Defensive injuries: a broken arm, bruising. He fell against the wall and hurt his back. Then there’s the poisoned dog.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Indeed.’
‘I mean the dog had been poisoned deliberately but the other animals died accidentally. They were shut in the barn without water. If the farmer’s body had been discovered earlier they might have survived – like the pig.’
She smiled. ‘Well there’s some good news then.’
He looked at her uncertainly, unsure how to take this. She smiled again, reassuringly, and he nodded.
‘How many houses actually border the farm?’
‘Five.’
‘Have you any suspicions if any of them might be responsible?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing obvious, Jo. According to the house-to-house comments, the inhabitants of the entire estate felt that the farm was scruffy and it devalued the property, but you don’t murder someone because your property’s devalued.’
‘You might if— Are any for sale?’
Korpanski shook his head. ‘No boards up, anyway.’
‘Right.’
She felt suddenly self-conscious, as though her ring was huge and would be noticed instantly. It felt hot and conspicuous on her finger.
Ten, nine, eight… He’d notice it in a minute. Seven, six, five…
But Korpanski’s attention was all on the case.
‘There is one thing,’ he said. ‘The guy who built the estate lives in one of the houses. He’s divorced and his ex-wife lives a couple of doors away.’
‘Really? That sounds interesting. So he hasn’t sold the final property?’
‘No.’
‘We’ll interview both him and his ex-wife. Nothing like a divorcee to spill the dirt, is there, Mike?’ She thought for a minute, then asked, ‘What about the farmer’s daughter?’
Mike practically shuddered. ‘Judy bloody Grimshaw,’ he said. ‘She was at school with me.’
Joanna couldn’t resist teasing him. ‘Not a schoolboy crush, Mike?’
‘Not likely. You want to see her.’
‘Well – is not being a beauty and being a schoolmate of yours likely to make her guilty?’
Korpanski grinned. ‘Much as I’d like to say yes, she was probably at work anyway.’
‘We have an alibi to check then, don’t we, Mike? I take it she’ll be the beneficiary?’
He nodded. ‘Probably. If the wife doesn’t surface.’
‘And this farmer’s daughter – is she married?’
‘Divorced, apparently.’
‘Right.’
‘A partner?’
Korpanski shrugged.
Joanna nodded. ‘It’s early days yet. But it might be worth talking to both her and her ex. As I said – nothing like a bit of spite to flush out the truth. There is one other significant fact that I haven’t had time to go and look at for myself. Mark Fask is doing the scenes of crime bit and he said that all the mattresses had been slashed.’
Joanna waited.
‘Grimshaw’s daughter said there was a rumour that her father kept money there.’
‘Not under the mattress, surely?’ But whether the story was true or not they both knew rumour could create sufficient motive. When Korpanski simply turned his dark eyes on her she continued with a sigh. ‘Well – at least it gives us a potential motive apart from the posh housing estate, though neither appears a valid reason for murder.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Right – let’s get on with it.’
‘After you.’
That was when his eyes landed on the ring. They widened. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe it.’ He looked at her, confused.
‘Congratulate me, Korpanski.’ She hadn’t meant for it to come out so sharply but the truth was that she’d dreaded this moment.
‘Sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘Congratulations, Jo. No need to ask who the lucky man is.’
‘No,’ she said shortly, before bursting out. ‘Well, you might sound a bit happier about it, Mike.’
‘Why should I be?’ He was at his truculent worst.
She glared at him. We all have our own perspective on events.
He planted himself in front of her. ‘Does this mean a big life change?’
Again she shook her head. ‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘It does not.’
‘And does Levin know this?’
Bloody Korpanski, she thought irritably. Why did he invariably put his finger right on the throbbing pulse of a problem? The truth was that they hadn’t really discussed this aspect of their engagement – or any other aspect for that matter. She frowned.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We can grab a coffee on the way.’
* * *
All briefings are the same, she reflected; interminable reading out from notebooks of irrelevant and frankly boring detail. The truth was that she was itching to get out to the farm, catch the feel of the murder scene, make her own observations, rather than rely on Korpanski’s and the officers assigned to the case. She wanted activity, to be involved, to speak to the main protagonists herself, size them up, get their measure and decide why Grimshaw had met with such an end.
So she listened with half an ear, ran her eyes down the diagrams and scenes of crime photographs, memorised the names and felt the old restlessness.
An hour later, she and Mike were heading out of Leek, along the Ashbourne road, towards Prospect Farm.
The day had brightened and the trees were beginning to show the first tinge of autumn. She sat back and let Mike drive, her Wellington boots in the back of the squad car. She’d worked on farm crime scenes before and was familiar with the hazards.
They passed the neat ‘development’ with its individually designed, generously sized homes and tidy lawns to the front. ‘Did you say nine houses, Mike?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why stop at nine, I wonder,’ she mused. ‘Does Gabriel Frankwell have plans to build more?’
Korpanski shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We ran a check yesterday. There’s no current planning permission application in that area. He lives in number 7 but he was out all day yesterday,’ he said, ‘so we haven’t spoken to him yet.’
‘Then keep your fingers crossed he’s around later,’ she said. ‘I shall be interested to meet these people myself.’
The entrance to the farm was only a couple of hundred yards beyond the estate and Joanna was immediately aware of the contrast. A gate, rotten and hanging drunkenly almost off its hinges, a dingy farmhouse beyond, reached by a muddy track. She was glad of the wellies.
Police tape had been stretched across the gate and it was easy to see the activity of the scenes of crime team. White-suited men were everywhere, looking like busy spacemen. To the left of the farmhouse, against the wall, stood a white forensic tent.
They left the car near the road and walked towards the scenes of crime team, squelching noisily through the mud.
Fask greeted her warmly. ‘Good holiday, Jo?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Very good. Thanks.’ She glanced towards the wall. ‘Shame for me to have missed some action but Korpanski here has filled me in. I’ll look at the murder scene first, I think. I’ll start from there.’
They stood outside the police tape, staring down at the wall, Joanna noticing everything The missing stones told their own story; the assault and then the neighbour scrambling over before climbing just as hastily back
to the safety of her own garden, starting a land slide of smaller stones. Her eyes took in the jumble of moss-covered lime-stone rocks, the numbered wooden pegs sticking out of the ground, marking where samples had been removed, shallow impressions where earth had been scooped up ready for the geologist’s analysis. After a while she turned away and followed Korpanski in the direction of the farmhouse.
‘The dog was lying here.’ He indicated the spot on the concrete yard where Ratchet had been so pathetically stretched out. The spot indicated by white marks and a round impression where the dog’s dish had been. To one side lay a small bouquet of wild flowers. Joanna eyed them and faced Korpanski with a question in her eyes, which he deliberately misunderstood.
‘I bet you any money it’s Mrs Weston,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘She’s a real animal lover.’
‘And how the hell did she gain access to the scene of a crime?’
Fask intervened. ‘We only had one guy here last night,’ he said. ‘And her house backs onto here.’
‘Hmm.’ Her disapproval needed no other expression.
‘Have you heard back from Beeston about the dog?’ Joanna enquired.
‘Not yet. He said it would take a couple of days.’
Joanna nodded.
‘Shall we take a look inside next?’
They walked into the parlour of the farmhouse. Parlour seemed an appropriately old-fashioned word for it – damp, undecorated since the nineteen forties, ancient flowered wallpaper – dirty cream and faded pink – a baize covered table with the remains of more than one meal on it. It spoke of a lonely, empty life with no pretence at tidiness or civilised cleanliness.
Joanna recalled a silly rhyme she had chanted as a child, Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly.
She shook her head. Being fanciful was not going to solve anything.
Fask was a civilian scenes of crime officer, with a talent for being able to mop up every single piece of forensic evidence from a crime scene. He was a good-looking guy, short, about five-foot-six, built squat and muscular like a Welshman, with very dark brown hair, heavy eyebrows and a spreading paunch.
He greeted Joanna warmly; they had worked on many cases together and had a good working relationship. ‘Where was it you went, Jo?’
‘Mojacar,’ she said. ‘Southern Spain.’
‘And she’s come back engaged,’ Korpanski put in.
‘Engaged?’ Fask looked shocked. ‘Well I never.’ Then added quickly, ‘Congratulations, Inspector. Does this mean you’ll be retiring from the Force?’
Joanna tossed back her thick hair. ‘Not a chance of it,’ she said.
‘You and Levin are going to be a busy couple then.’
‘Like plenty of others,’ Joanna said calmly, walking on.
The bathroom was downstairs. Joanna had glimpsed it through a half-open kitchen door. Blue linoleum, a white bath with a stained plastic curtain round it, a toilet and a square sink with a tap that dripped with an irritatingly irregular beat. No modernisation here. She returned to the kitchen and ran gloved hands over the blue and cream cabinet, remembering. When she had been a child, her grandmother had had an identical piece of furniture; tall, with a glazed top and a tray which dropped down to form a work surface. They must have been the height of fashion in postwar Britain. How many of these must there have been in existence? She smiled and recalled her grandmother buttering a hot cross bun for her, gnarled hands, an elusive scent of lavender. She looked around and knew no modernisation had taken place in the entire house since the war. The forensics team had been busy here. She could see marks everywhere. She left them to it, knowing that some of the evidence collected could answer some of their questions. The process of digestion, together with the advancing mould on the plates linked to samples of stomach contents, might further help to pin down the date and time of Grimshaw’s death.
The sitting room was very small, with an old television set perched on a cream-painted kitchen chair and a two-seater sofa of brown leatherette. In the corner was a door that led to a narrow staircase. As soon as she set foot on the bottom step, Joanna was aware of the intense search that had taken place here. Feathers, foam and cotton had flown everywhere, creating an unpleasant air of fustiness. Halfway up, she turned to speak to Korpanski. ‘Someone,’ she said, ‘must have walked out of here looking like the victim of a Northern Ireland Sectarian Campaign.’ When he looked befuddled, she laughed. ‘Tarred and feathered,’ she said.
She reached the top. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, all of similar size and shape, small with slanting ceilings and windows so dirty they hardly let in the light of day. Each held a double bed and they had all been subjected to the same assault. Grubby pink blankets were strewn all over the floor and the mattresses had been ripped apart. Feathers were everywhere, a few still airborne, meandering aimlessly in the breeze that blew in through the poorly fitting window frames. Her eyes settled on the torn covers of the mattresses and she wondered: had they contained money or not? Was this a crime with the simplest of motives – robbery – or something a little more devious?
She held a feather in her hand. ‘Is this a blind, do you think, Mike? Meant to divert us from the true motive for the attack.’
‘If there was a motive,’ Korpanski responded glumly.
She couldn’t argue with the comment. So many crimes these days were motiveless or had such a weak reason – ‘I thought he was dissing me’ or ‘I asked for summat, nice, like, and he wasn’t playin’, so I thought I’d kick ’im around a bit.’ Or, increasingly often, ‘Sorry, mate, can’t remember. I’d been on the pop, see?’
She sighed and hoped this wouldn’t turn out to be one of those crimes.
‘Who, out of our likely rogues’ gallery, is out at the moment?’
Korpanski had already thought this one through and had searched the computer before he’d gone home the previous night.
‘No one that would do this sort of crime, Jo. Not local, anyway. No one who’s out. If this is someone from around Leek, they’re new to murder.’
‘That’s what worries me.’ She swivelled round to peer beyond the houses towards the winding track that led to the Ashbourne road. ‘But as the farm is invisible from the main road, I’d be surprised if it was one of our little visitors from Manchester or some other hotbed of villainy.’
‘So?’ Korpanski held her gaze steadily.
‘Something else strikes me,’ Joanna said, wandering out of the bedroom and back down the stairs, out again into the damp, grey day. ‘If the entire assault took place where Grimshaw lay, our killer was taking a bit of a chance. The farmyard is clearly visible from at least two of the estate houses – number 1, the Weston’s home, and number 3, which is where Mrs Frankwell lives, according to your plan.’
Korpanski nodded.
‘The cowshed obscures the view from the other houses on that side, numbers 5, 7 and 9, unless someone was in the garden and they are open plan.’
‘They’re all fenced in,’ Korpanski replied.
‘As I recall from the briefing, your last definite sighting was from the little Mostyn girl, Rachel,’ Joanna continued, rounding the yard towards the cowshed. ‘And when his body was discovered, Grimshaw had been dead for about a week.’ She grinned at Korpanski. ‘Right so far?’
He nodded.
‘I take it we’re working on the assumption that Grimshaw died round about the 10th, 11th, or 12th of September.’
Again Korpanski nodded in agreement.
‘I suggest, then, that we concentrate our inquiries, initially, on those dates, and spread out if we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.’ She took a step back. ‘I just want to ask Mark Fask something. Oh, and Mike, let’s have another briefing early tomorrow morning, say eight a.m., and get our team to focus on those dates.’
Fask was coming out of the cowshed.
‘Do we know where Grimshaw was first attacked?’
‘Interesting, that,’ he said. ‘There was some blood near the b
ack door, which I’ve sent for analysis.’
‘Isn’t that where the dog was?’
‘Ratchet, God rest his soul, if dogs have one,’ Fask grinned, ‘was fastened on a chain. The pool of blood we found, mind – not a splash or a spray, nothing that could travel – was three feet beyond the reach of Ratchet’s chain. I would almost bet my next month’s salary that the blood is Grimshaw’s – not the dog’s. We’ve also found blood at the back of the barn and cowshed, as though he was trying to escape his assailant. My theory is that he was pursued past numbers 5 and 3, ending up at the back of the garden of number 1.’
Joanna felt her mouth drop open. ‘Now I see how it happened.’ She looked at Mike. ‘Incredible. A prolonged and violent attack – in full view of two houses, within shouting distance of another seven. Very risky for the assailant unless he could be absolutely sure none of Grimshaw’s neighbours were at home that day. Which suggests that either it was not a premeditated attack or that our killer was very familiar with the daily routine of the inhabitants of The Prospect Farm Estate. Grimshaw was first hit near the back door, then pursued round the back of the barns. He was the victim of a prolonged and violent assault then later thrown against the wall and the copestone smashed down on his head. It’s possible he staggered towards the wall hoping for help from his neighbours – then he fell and the murder weapon was to hand.’
‘What could you tell from the ground, Mark? Footprints?’
‘Unfortunately,’ Fask said, ‘there’s been a week of heavy rain. We got no definition of footprints at all.’
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