The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Sergeant Lumb was chairing the briefing. Not Richard Thornhill, Jill thought; not important enough for him or the Deputy Chief Constable. Lumb was talking about a spate of shoplifting. She began to make notes. Not Richard. Her vision blurred. Her eyes were watering. The smoke was irritating them.

  There was a sound behind her, and a sudden draught of cool air on her neck. Once again, the heads twitched around the table. She did not look round.

  “And then there’s last night’s fatality,” Lumb said, and paused with a sense of occasion to relight his pipe. “Nasty business.” The match went out and there was another pause. “Car went off the Forest road about 11 p.m. Misty night, as you know. He took the Little Russia bend too fast by the look of it. Nasty drop there. Poor chap was dead when we got there.”

  “Who was he?” Fuggle of the Post asked. He glanced at Jill as he spoke – no, not at her, but past her.

  “Timothy Wynoll – young chap,” Lumb replied, glancing down at his notes. “He was at university in London. Parents are abroad. Singapore. They’ve been notified by now. His aunt lives up near Ashbridge. It was her car, as a matter of fact.”

  “Isn’t it term-time?” Jill asked, wondering if there was someone behind her, and if so, who. “What was he doing in Lydmouth?”

  “The aunt’s away – on a cruise, lucky for some, eh? – and he promised he’d come down and check the pipes hadn’t frozen after that cold snap. There was a letter from her in his pocket.”

  “These students. All paid for with our taxes. Marvellous.” Fuggle rearranged the phlegm in his throat, making a sound like shingle shifting beneath a retreating wave on the seashore. “Been drinking, had he?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say, Mr Fuggle.” Lumb sat back in his chair. “No doubt the details will come out at the inquest.”

  Jill raised her hand. “Anyone else involved? Another car?”

  “Not that we know of, Miss Francis.”

  She glanced over her shoulder. Richard Thornhill was in the doorway. He gave her a hint of a smile and retreated. The door closed behind him.

  “Chicken,” she murmured to herself or perhaps to him. “Chicken.”

  Fuggle stared at her with hard, shiny eyes like a pair of boiled sweets.

  * * *

  “The thing is, sir,” PC Porter said, “it was odd. That’s all.”

  “What was?” Thornhill asked.

  “The car, sir. The one in Little Russia.” Porter had waylaid Thornhill on the stairs at police headquarters. He was a very large young man, and he loomed like a mountain of flesh over the Detective Chief Inspector. “Sergeant Lumb sent me out to fetch it with the truck from the garage,” he went on apologetically. “There it was, little Ford Popular, terrible state, windscreen gone. Shame really, couldn’t have been more than a year or two old but it’s only good for scrap. Mind you, could have been worse – he was smoking, look, and the whole thing could have gone up in flames if the petrol had leaked, yes and him too, not that it—”

  “But what was odd?”

  “Sorry, sir. Well, for a start, the car was in first gear.”

  “Damn it, Porter, what’s so odd about that?”

  The young constable flinched as if Thornhill had hit him. “If he was coming up the hill from Lydmouth he’d be in third, maybe, and then change down to second for the bend. But not first. Not unless he’d stopped for some reason.”

  “Why would he have done that?”

  “Maybe he pulled over on to the layby. But then why would he have gone over the edge? So I still don’t understand how it could have happened. And anyway, if he was coming up and missed the bend he wouldn’t have gone over the edge there. It – it doesn’t feel right. Even if he was plastered.”

  Porter ran out of words and stared with dumb hope at Thornhill. He had a childish faith in the Chief Inspector. Thornhill tried to ignore the knowledge that the briefing would soon be over, and therefore Jill Francis might come out of the conference room at any moment. Most of his colleagues thought Porter was stupid, and with some justification. But, as Thornhill knew, sometimes Porter’s stupidity was more effective than mere cleverness could ever be; and, besides, he had a strangely profound understanding of cars and their ways.

  “This layby,” Thornhill said. “It’s actually on the outer edge of the bend, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. Old line of the road, maybe. There’s a fence over the drop, but that’s mainly gone. He went over at the downhill end. But, sir, if he’d missed the bend, he’d have gone over higher up.”

  “Witnesses? Anyone live around there?”

  “Only the Josephs, sir, down the bottom of the valley. Sarge went to see them, said they’d heard nothing.”

  “What was it like where the car was?”

  Porter wrinkled his broad, pink forehead. “Came down twelve or fifteen feet – slammed into a rock, that did a lot of damage, and then banged into an old cooker. Folks tip their rubbish down there, look, it’s not right. Driver’s door comes open, and out he comes. Head’s a real mess, they say – all cut and bloody. Not nice at all.”

  A drunk in a car, Thornhill thought, a winter night, poor visibility, an unexpected bend with a dangerous drop beyond. What was so odd about the fact that the car was a wreck and the drunk was dead?

  “I found the wallet down there,” Porter was saying, his mouth forming the words very slowly as if no one had ever said them before. “Just by the cooker. Sarge wondered where that had got to. Must have been loose in the car and fell out when he did.”

  Thornhill glanced at the conference room door. “Any sign of theft?”

  Porter shook his head. “Six quid in the wallet.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Upstairs, sir. With the rest of his stuff. Sergeant Lumb’s got it.”

  “I’ll take a look at it,” Thornhill said reluctantly. “And the clothes.”

  The relief on Porter’s face glowed like a neon sign. Thornhill led the way upstairs. Lumb’s desk was almost invisible beneath a mound of files and papers, lightly powdered with pipe ash. Porter pulled out one of the cardboard boxes on the floor beside it. Thornhill looked quickly through Wynoll’s clothes – a khaki-coloured duffel coat, a college scarf, a tweed jacket, flannel trousers, an Aertex shirt, vest, pants and socks. No hat, no tie, no jersey. The shoes were black Derbys, stained with mud. One shoulder of the duffel coat was thickly encrusted with blood, still tacky to the touch.

  He looked up. “Where is he?”

  “Up the RAF, sir,” Porter said, which meant in the mortuary of the town’s RAF Hospital on the Chepstow Road.

  “Possessions?”

  Porter held out an old shoebox. Thornhill looked at the wallet first. No surprises – a cheque book; a letter from the aunt, postmarked Southampton and addressed to a student hostel in Bloomsbury; a membership card for the Photography Club at University College; a driving licence with an address near Ashbridge, presumably the home of the aunt; a condom, carefully disguised in an outer wrapping torn from the corner of an envelope; a book of stamps with one used, a bus ticket from Lydmouth to Ashbridge, a return train ticket to London and six pound notes.

  Wynoll had kept a running total on his bank balance in his cheque book. He had had well over a hundred pounds in his current account, so lack of money hadn’t been one of his problems. According to the letter, the aunt had expected her nephew to come down yesterday afternoon. The dates on the tickets confirmed it.

  There was also a packet of Park Drive with two cigarettes left. Another cigarette, half-smoked but not stubbed out, had fallen inside the duffel coat, where it had caused a burn before going out. Wynoll’s other possessions were car keys, a Chubb door key and a handkerchief, once white and now almost the colour of the duffel coat. And a bottle of Teacher’s, still with nearly an inch of whisky in the bottom and a smudge of blood on the label.

  “What about in the car? Anything there?”

  “It’s in the yard, sir.”

  “Let’s have a look.�
��

  They went down to the yard at the back of police headquarters. There was a separate shed reserved for cars under investigation and equipped with an inspection pit. The Ford Popular was still on the trailer that had brought it back to Lydmouth. The front off-side of the car was like crumpled wrapping paper. One of the headlights had come adrift and was dangling by the side, attached only by wires. The windscreen and the driver’s window were broken.

  Thornhill pulled open the door, which was hanging drunkenly on its hinges. He looked along the row of instruments on the dashboard. He turned the handle that had wound the driver’s window up and down. At the moment the glass had broken, the window had been closed. He crouched to peer at the floor.

  “Put some gloves on,” he said, straightening up. “I want everything out of the car.”

  Porter stared open-mouthed. “What?” There was a pause. “Sir.”

  “Everything that moves. Mats, whatever’s in the glove compartment, contents of the ashtray, even the sweet wrappers. Put it all on the bench. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  The briefing had finished. Thornhill found Lumb skimming through a file in reception.

  “The Little Russia crash,” Thornhill said. “Keep me posted, will you?”

  The sergeant frowned. “Any reason, sir?”

  “Just in case.”

  Lumb tapped the file. “We’ve traced Wynoll’s movements yesterday. He was drinking in the Bathurst most of the evening with a young man about the same age as him. Barmaid didn’t know who it was but she said they were having a bit of an argy-bargy about something at closing time. Couldn’t say what about.”

  “Description?”

  “Little chap. But she said he wasn’t bad-looking, for what that’s worth. Trouble is, kids all look the same these days. They left together.”

  When Thornhill returned to the yard, Porter was waiting by the door of the shed. Thornhill picked his way through the contents of the car. Apart from a surprising quantity of small stones and pieces of dried mud, there were half a dozen cigarette ends, more Park Drive by the look of them, along with used matches, an AA handbook and ten or twelve vividly green and purple wrappers from Brashers Mint Imperials. He put to one side a selection of less predictable items from a piece of string to a brown-paper bag containing two dried apple cores, from a travelling sewing kit to a half-used jar of Marmite.

  Marmite, he thought, mints and matches. String. A sewing kit. Apple cores. His mind strained to combine them into something that made a pattern.

  Matches?

  When he had finished he went back outside. Porter stared expectantly at him. The constable’s mouth was open as though he was hoping his superior officer might feed him with a titbit.

  “Yes,” Thornhill said at last. “Perhaps it is.”

  “Yes, sir. But what, sir?”

  “As you said, Porter: perhaps it’s odd.”

  * * *

  “Chicken,” Jill said aloud.

  She was alone in the layby, standing under an umbrella in the rain beside her green Morris Minor. Behind her was the road, snaking up to Ashbridge and the Forest, divided from the layby by a ragged crescent of saplings, bramble and long grass. It was unexpectedly private. In front of her were the rusting remains of a barbed wire fence, draped on rotting posts. Sections of it had fallen away.

  The view was beautiful. The densely wooded Little Russia valley stretched downhill, narrow and steep-sided, funnelling outwards and curving to the north in the direction of the invisible river below. The layby itself was less attractive. A rotting mattress, disgorging its horsehair bowels, lay at one end, among rusting tins, empty bottles and the remains of a sack of plaster that had left dirty-white streaks in the mud.

  She walked slowly across the cracked tarmac to the largest of the gaps in the fence, a stretch of about five yards towards the end closest to the road downhill. The drop was almost vertical. The underlying sandstone was exposed. At the bottom was a jagged rock about the size of a small caravan. Beside it was a rusting gas cooker on its side, a selection of empty tins and a couple of bald tyres. It would be possible to scramble down there, but it was not something to attempt in a decent coat, a snugly-fitting skirt and two-inch heels.

  Farther down the slope a roof was visible through the branches, the clay tiles streaked with lichen. A little barn, perhaps, she thought, or a shepherd’s hut. It must be invisible in summer. The Forest was studded with these mysterious little buildings, usually ruinous, which must once have had necessary reasons for being where they were. Unlike her.

  She stared at the rock. This was where the boy had died. Shards of glass glinted beside the rock. She wondered if she was imagining a smear of pale grey paint on one side. What had she expected to find? An explanation? The confirmation of a hunch?

  There was a rustling below her, somewhere in the bushes below the rock. Jill felt suddenly guilty, as though detected in a small, shabby crime. She glanced down into the ravine and at the same time took a step backwards.

  Her movement was too little, too late. Not five yards from the rock, a face appeared among the branches. There was no possibility of a silent and dignified withdrawal now.

  “Hello, Richard,” Jill said.

  Formal as ever, he touched his hat. “Good afternoon, Miss Francis.”

  “When we’re alone you might as well call me Jill, don’t you think? I know things between us have – well, things have changed, but it’s quite absurd to be so pompous.” Colour rose in his face. “Very well. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m a journalist,” Jill said. “Remember?”

  “I can hardly forget.” He touched his hat again. “I won’t keep you.”

  Jill turned on her heel, leaving Thornhill in undisputed possession of Little Russia. She climbed into the car, lit a cigarette and started the engine.

  Her hands were shaking slightly. Chicken, she thought. That’s the trouble with all of us – we’re all bloody chicken.

  * * *

  When he was alone in Little Russia, Thornhill methodically quartered the scene of the crash, picking his way among the rubbish, the shattered branches and the fragments of rock. It was a shocking waste of time to be doing this himself, he told himself, particularly as his reason for doing was so tenuous – in fact not really a reason at all. And what had Jill been up to? Damn it, she was editing the Gazette now – if they wanted local colour for their piece on the crash, why not send a minion?

  Shivering because of the cold, Thornhill set off towards the Forestry road where he had left his car. He followed a winding track that pursued an eccentric four-footed logic, for Little Russia was more frequented by deer and rabbits, badgers and foxes than by humans. He stumbled into a puddle, spattering filthy water on the skirts of his navy-blue overcoat. It began to rain, and he had not brought his umbrella.

  The track passed the corner of the small stone building with its sagging roof of double Roman pantiles, patched in places with corrugated iron. There was an unglazed opening high in the gable but no other windows. The door, held in place with a rusting, hand-forged Suffolk latch, was still sound.

  A unexpected colour, a vivid mauve, caught Thornhill’s eye on the ground immediately outside the door. He stooped. There were two ticket stubs a few inches from the door jamb. He picked them up and felt them between finger and thumb. They couldn’t have been there long, for they were still dry. A tiny oddity? He slipped them between two leaves of his notebook.

  Thornhill lifted the latch, pushed open the door and went into the barn. The air smelled damp but unexpectedly fresh. The roof was still weathertight. He stood in the doorway and watched the rain drifting over the treetops towards the valley below.

  He turned his back on the weather and, as he moved, his foot snagged on a soft, yielding obstruction. He looked down. There was a filthy brown blanket on the earth floor.

  His immediate thought was that at some point a tramp must have passed a chilly night here. He walked about the building, automatic
ally looking for something that would confirm or refute the theory. He found nothing. In the doorway again, he bent down to the blanket and examined it more closely. There was a cluster of darker spots on the coarse wool, fresher-looking than the ancient dirt on the fabric. He angled the blanket towards the light from the doorway. The spots were rust-red and dry to the touch. Blood? If it was, then the colour suggested it was relatively recent in origin.

  Thornhill straightened up. The rain was petering away, driving north-east up the river valley below with a freshening wind behind it. Suddenly he was in a hurry to get back to Lydmouth, to the warmth and familiarity of police headquarters.

  The path between the barn and the Forestry track was easier going than the path to the site of the crash. In less than ten minutes he reached the broad ride, surfaced with rubble. From there it was only a few yards to the junction of the track and the road, where he had left his car.

  A brick house stood on the corner – a square modern building in an unkempt garden overshadowed by gangling conifers. As Thornhill approached, an ambulance was pulling out of its concrete driveway. It swung on to the road, where it turned left towards Lydmouth.

  Thornhill unlocked his car door. He glanced up at the house. He was just in time to catch sight of a face, little more than a pale blur, before it vanished from an upper window.

  * * *

  “He’s not absolutely sure,” Amy Gwyn-Thomas said. “The boy doesn’t come to chapel very often now. Of course they change so quickly at that age, don’t they? And he’s been away in the army.”

  “Who isn’t sure?” said Jill, who had not been listening to her secretary.

  “Ronald – Mr Prout.” Amy blushed. “I happened to bump into him in the Gardenia, quite accidentally. The rush at lunchtime is getting worse and worse. We had to share a table.”

  Jill didn’t believe in that sort of accident. She suspected Amy of conducting a clandestine courtship with Mr Prout, who kept a toyshop and played the organ in the Baptist Chapel.