‘You pair go back up to the office so you can use their landline. Put into motion whatever background and movement checks are possible. One of you bring Daphne Bullingdon here, maybe with a workmate who knows him best – see if they can identify what he might be wearing – what’s missing. Then get a photograph and a description circulated. Leyton – pick me up on the road in an hour. Turn right out of the bottom of the drive, and then first right up the lane signposted to Overthwaite – it’ll bring you past here. Just carry on until you find me.’
DS Leyton makes a somewhat doubting face, but otherwise does not question his superior’s rather vague idea of a rendezvous.
‘What are you thinking, Guv?’
Skelgill glances out of the window.
‘I’ll just have a bit of a mooch round. You never know.’
He doesn’t know, either – but he does know he might absorb something that later will prove to be a small but significant piece in an as-yet-undefined jigsaw – a catalyst, of sorts; there is always the hope. But right now what began as a seemingly straightforward burglary has taken a couple of most definitely unconventional twists, possibly sinister. He drifts into the living room as his colleagues leave. Cursorily, he casts about. The overall impression is of tidiness. There is a worn sofa, a rather threadbare rug, and an out-of-date television set (though there cannot be much of a signal). The restored timber floor and open hearth, however, endow the room with a homely feel, despite the lack of domestic paraphernalia. There are part-burned church candles on the oak mantelpiece. There is an aura of calm, enhanced by the impression of the enfolding woods, green-tinted light and muted afternoon birdsong. He’d feel happy living here, though it is isolated.
He lingers a while longer, allowing his thoughts to settle, much like he would wait for the ripples around his boat, rowed to a promising spot and anchored, to die away; for any fish disturbed to get used to the renewed stillness, and maybe return. It is a meditative mode, not trying too hard. He leaves the living room and follows the dogleg of the hallway to the back door. It opens into a little lean-to porch, covered on all sides. There are the three remaining bin-liners described by his colleague – the ‘plain-sight’ hiding place. There is a nylon waterproof jacket, the only item on a row of coat hooks, and beneath on the stone floor a pair of cheap wellingtons, of a considerably smaller size than he would take. As he opens the outer door and half turns back, a fishing rod propped up in the corner catches his eye. He almost missed it! It is a seven-foot spinning rod, rigged with a large brightly coloured plastic plug, a lure that puzzles him, not being one that he would employ hereabouts. And – a cardinal sin in his book – it has been left with a tangle of line and a strand of still-green pondweed attached to the treble hooks. He might not be the most fastidious person in the world, but his fishing tackle is always cleaned after use and sprayed with WD40 – you don’t want your gear going rusty; you want it ready for next time. This inconsistency has him staring pensively for a few moments. But without straining himself on the matter he exits and closes the door behind him.
The modest, rather run-down property is situated at the western margin of the estate, where the perimeter wall, beyond which runs a quiet public lane, hems in Bullmire Wood. The cottage was evidently at one time a gatehouse, for there are substantial iron gates, rusted and chained and fallen into disuse, heavily overgrown with nettles and docks and brambles, like the environs of the cottage itself. It strikes him that at one time this may have been the main entrance to the estate. What was the avenue leading to Shuteham Hall is now a ride crowded by woodland, though wheel ruts in the leaf litter reveal some signs of vehicular activity. Several pallets of building materials, concrete blocks, shrink-wrapped timber and plastic sacks of sand and cement, may explain the latter. The renovation work in progress appears to be the addition of an extension to the bedroom – in time an en suite bathroom perhaps. A rudimentary doorway has been knocked through, but sealed up again, perhaps until the newbuild is watertight.
It is a warm day, though still pleasantly cool in the wood. The moist air is resonant with birdsong; blackbirds in particular seem to specialise in these conditions; a tide of sound, their fluty melodies flood even the tiniest interstices between trunk and branch and leaf. At ground level the herb layer appears to pulsate, so vigorous is growth at this time of year. The refracted electric sapphire of bluebell swards dazzles the eye, and stippled with pink campion and white stitchwort, nature seems to be making its own abstract version of the British flag – or is it the Stars and Stripes?
Though Skelgill’s first love is for the open fells, the oak woods of Lakeland are an intrinsic part of the landscape, always a pleasure after a day out on the high tops, the cream on an upside-down cake. As such, they are second home to Skelgill, and accordingly he divines the difference between two paths that run into the thicket from the clearing at the rear of the cottage. One, well trodden down to bare earth, but barely six inches wide, curving away and passing after about twenty feet beneath a suspended fallen bough, is a badger track. A second, less distinct, where herbaceous vegetation is bruised and shrubs may have been brushed aside, has the hallmarks of human passage. Skelgill has with him the estate brochure. He unfolds it to display the map. He is immediately impressed by the accuracy of its draughtsmanship. Often these things are stylised, almost cartoonish in their representation of an area, but whoever drew this up must have started with a trace from the Ordnance Survey, and there is a helpful imperial scale. Even the compass mark is calibrated to the national grid, and Skelgill uses the sun to rotate slightly on his heel and achieve the correct orientation.
His present location is marked as West Gate House. Bullmire Wood extends north, south and east from where he stands. Over Water lies a good three-quarters of a mile away, in an easterly direction. There are three properties with which he is unfamiliar: Grouse Lodge, well towards the northeast, in a separate wooded area marked Cushat Copse, after which moorland begins to take over; The Bield, its name suggestive of a shepherd’s hut on open fellside to the northwest; and – of most interest to Skelgill – Keeper’s Cottage. The latter is deep inside Bullmire Wood, beside a ride marked Crow Road that leads via an intersecting diagonal, Long Shoot, to Shuteham Hall, bisecting the walled garden and Garden Cottage and the small artificial lake, rather presumptuously called Troutmere; Boat House is more prosaically labelled.
A ‘safe walking route’ – if there can ever be such a thing on a shooting estate – a green dotted line, according to the key, links up the various properties and topographical features, and it is obviously the recommended way of getting about. From the gatehouse, the advice would be either to take the avenue back to the hall, or, from the occluded gates, a perimeter path alongside the boundary wall, eventually to pick up the so-called Crow Road. But, curiosity being the better part of valour, Skelgill plunges instead into the undergrowth, the faint path that has its bearing towards Keeper’s Cottage.
He knows from experience that quite quickly a route can be forged. Whenever he has tried to keep a good fishing spot secret, for instance beside Bass Lake’s wooded shores, it is a devil of a job not disturbing the bankside vegetation and flagging to others the way. In the past he has resorted to wading along the shoreline to cover his tracks. So he reads this as not a regular thoroughfare, a daily route that in time would be established like a wider, less discrete version of the badger path. But it has seen some recent use.
Ten minutes tramping finds him reaching the edge of a clearing. He has been moving rapidly, though ruing that he did not switch to better gripping footwear when he last passed his car, and now he braces against the trunk of a hefty oak to avoid exposing himself. Ahead is Keeper’s Cottage, the rear of the building. Crow Road, here a turf greenway, passes the other side. There is a separate shelter fashioned of roughhewn timber with a corrugated iron roof, an open-sided log store stacked at one end with seasoning firewood. The little construction looks new, and beneath it stands the quad bike he saw Lawrence Mel
ling ride previously. The man probably has no need of a car – he will no doubt have use of the Defender referred to by Miranda Bullingdon; probably it will be part of his job to move guests around the off-road tracks of the estate. A long-handled axe has its head embedded in a tree stump, and there are fresh chippings in the grass. Of the keeper’s regular dog, the working cocker, there is no sign, and Skelgill would have expected it to have detected his presence – certainly if the animal has free rein about the property.
He stands in the shadow of the oak as if he is expecting something to happen. He does not really know why he is here; he has followed his nose, as the saying goes, easily done in the Skelgill family, as another saying goes. He feels inexplicably reluctant to progress further, though there are no signs of life inside the cottage, no movement at the windows, no plume of smoke from the chimney, no excited yelping of the hyperactive hound. Yet he has the distinct feeling that he is being watched. He knows this is illogical – he would have heard someone following – and who would be waiting? He wonders if in fact there is something in the air – a scent that subconsciously has triggered some alarm. He is reminded of the keeper’s intrusive aftershave when he arrived at the estate office to collect Miranda Bullingdon. Just as he ponders, from the edge of the wood across the ride emerge five roe deer, a buck and two does and two diminutive fawns. They are unhurried, unperturbed; he keeps perfectly still. They drift out of picture, behind the cottage to reappear on the other side; only now do they show a little more urgency, and break into a trot, flashing their white hindquarters as they cross into the woods to his left. Perhaps they too have got wind of something – although they tell him there is neither man nor dog at the front of the building. And then he spies what might have spurred them along – approaching briskly along the ride to his right is a human figure – to his surprise, it is Karen Williamson.
Skelgill edges around the tree, better to conceal his presence, watching with one eye – but she pays little attention to her surroundings; she looks straight ahead and her expression is distracted by thought. He notices she is carrying the hessian bag that contained the flask and mugs and biscuits; two mugs – a fact that had not escaped his attention; she could not have known he was coming to the walled garden. The small irregularity begs further questions – she must have passed close by her own cottage, why is she bringing the bag here?
The young woman disappears from view. He does not hear whether she opens the door, but he presumes she enters the property, for it is two or three minutes before she re-emerges and retraces her steps, perhaps less purposefully than on her approach; she still carries the bag. At this point Skelgill finds his interest sufficiently piqued to overcome his inertia – but in the nick of time he glimpses a movement in the dense undergrowth beyond the ride – Lawrence Melling’s dog, foraging like any good cocker; indeed it puts up an indignant hen pheasant that comes barrelling in Skelgill’s direction and causes him to duck behind the tree. Perhaps this is just as well, for a second later the gamekeeper himself steps out onto the ride, toting a shotgun and casually glancing right and then left. In this second action he must see the diminishing figure of Karen Williamson, for as Skelgill looks on the man watches, his eyes narrowed, for a good fifteen seconds. But, when he might hail her – since surely she had sought him – he opts not to, and strides out of Skelgill’s sight towards the front of the cottage.
Though he is comfortably downwind, Skelgill knows the dog could find him in a trice should it come his way, and he backs off cautiously until there is sufficient foliage between him and the property to enable him to move unseen. Treading carefully he skirts the clearing with the intention of using Crow Road in parallel, to guide his passage to the boundary wall and his ill-defined appointment with his colleagues. But his progress is suddenly arrested – ach, the stench! And now he recognises it, intense, pungent, musky: rotting carrion. He catches his breath, so sharp is its bite. And, sure enough, where the clearing merges with the ride there is a section of what looks like fencing, three strands of wire strung between half a dozen posts. Maybe fifteen feet long, as a barrier it serves no apparent function – but its purpose is unequivocal, for it is strung with crows, magpies, stoats, moles and miscellaneous rodents, their corpses distorted, dangling like the crochets and quavers on the score of a manic death metal dirge. A gamekeeper’s larder. His intuition was right; he had smelt a rat.
5. RECAP
Monday, late afternoon – Cockermouth
‘Never compete with the tea lady, Leyton.’
‘What’s that, Guv?’
Skelgill has rudely silenced his partner with a raised palm. Now he looks at him in a rather disdainful manner.
‘I thought you’d done the presentation skills course? It’s the only thing I remember. When the lunch trolley comes in, everyone stops listening.’
DS Leyton regards his superior with some suspicion. He has no such recall and would not put it past Skelgill to have invented this maxim for his own purposes. But, there is some substance to his claim, in that DS Jones approaches bearing a tray laden with frothy coffees and slices of Cumberland sand cake. Moreover, Skelgill has resisted all attempts at conversation during the journey via back lanes to his “private parking space” – an obscure spot requiring extreme local knowledge, reached by literally bisecting Cockermouth’s Jennings Brewery to arrive at the confluence of the rivers Derwent and Cocker. Naturally he spent a minute surveying the waters before leading his team to an inconspicuous coffee shop in a narrow terraced street on the upper floor of a bakery. While his logic for delay might have been guessed at along the lines that they have plenty to discuss and that someone should take proper notes for a report and action plan, his colleagues know him well enough to recognise when he needs his own thoughts and feelings to macerate. Indeed, he had endured in surprisingly indifferent silence DS Leyton’s somewhat cavalier performance at the wheel of his cherished shooting brake, other than to grunt the odd instruction at unmarked junctions. Now, furnished with energy-giving victuals – the ‘tea lady’ likewise settled – he gives the go-ahead.
‘Start again, Leyton. What do we know about Stan the Man?’
‘Ooh – er, in that case we probably want to begin with the passport.’
DS Leyton glances apprehensively at his fellow sergeant, who is evidently almost as hungry as Skelgill – indeed she skipped lunch in order to accommodate his timings – and so has not stood on ceremony in tucking into her cake. She raises an apologetic hand as her colleagues wait, Skelgill decidedly impatiently. Catlike, she licks sticky drizzle topping from her upper lip and narrows her eyes at Skelgill; it is rather by way of “touché”.
‘Okay – firstly, Immigration have provided us with a digital photo from the passport database, which has been circulated to all ports and forces together with a description. Obviously, since we possess his passport, it won’t trigger an alert. Secondly, however, I’ve been advised that about one-third of Moldovans also have Romanian citizenship through family connections – this allows them to travel and work freely in the Schengen Area.’ She pauses to let her colleagues absorb the significance of this fact. ‘So, there is the possibility he has another passport. However, no Romanian passport in his name has been used to exit – or indeed enter – the UK. That does not preclude a separate identity.’
Skelgill remains pensive, giving little away. He picks on a more prosaic aspect.
‘What’s he wearing?’
‘That’s me, Guv.’ DS Leyton raises an index finger. ‘Like you asked, I took Daphne Bullingdon and one of the workers back to the gatehouse. A Polish geezer by the name of Artur – that’s Arthur in our money – er, now – what’s this – can’t read me own flamin’ writing!’
He squints hopelessly at his notebook and DS Jones leans closer to provide assistance with the taxing surname.
‘Czernecka.’
‘Just as well I got him to spell it.’ He grins at DS Jones – and is about to say something that might be a digression –
for he checks himself, seeing Skelgill looking irked. ‘Cut a long story short, Stan’s not exactly got an extensive wardrobe – his regular leather jacket was on a hook on the back of the front door and his good shoes on the floor. The outer garments apparently missing are a green fleecy with the Shuteham Hall emblem on it, trail shoes, and black denim jeans.’
‘His work gear, aye?’
‘Seems that way, Guv. Makes sense I suppose. I mean – let’s say he’s dodged into the castle and half-inched those diamonds – he’d look less suspicious going about in his everyday workwear.’ DS Leyton glances at DS Jones as if for corroboration, as though they might have discussed this theory. ‘Say he’s got connections – we know all about these Romanian crime gangs operating in the Home Counties – he’d just have to leg it back down to his cottage, hop over the wall, next thing he’s been spirited away in a motor.’
Skelgill is looking decidedly uncomfortable. Though it is a reasonable line of inquiry in the absence of an actual lead, why would the man make a getaway in distinctive branded work clothes? Why not take a change of outfit? And why leave the cash and passport and why leave the remaining jewels? There could be another half-a-million’s worth in the dressing table drawer for all they know. But he does not voice these objections.
‘What about his family?’
DS Jones replies.
‘We’re trying to make contact through the Moldovan authorities. I’ve not had anything back, yet. Obviously that process will at least confirm his identity – or otherwise.’
And now DS Leyton adds a rider.
‘It’s believed he last went home to Moldova in December, for a week in the run-up to Christmas. That’s what he told Daphne Bullingdon. The estate needed all the staff back on duty to work as beaters for the Boxing Day shoot. His workmates are saying he’s not married and there’s no kids. But I reckon there might be a girlfriend.’ As the sergeant speaks he produces his mobile phone and thumbs through a series of screens. ‘I did a more thorough search of the cottage. Look, this photograph was in a bedside drawer, underneath some t-shirts. I took a snap of it.’
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