Souvenirs of Murder

by Margaret Duffy

  ‘A scenes-of-crime team is still working there. No one knows – yet.’

  ‘You went back to the house to try to get Leanne out. That means you must have been mobile, after a fashion.’

  ‘Look, Ingrid, I didn’t kill those people!’

  ‘I know, sorry, but I’m playing your hard-hearted consultant and trying to get to the bottom of this. Frankly though, I can’t understand why you’re not under some kind of arrest or suspension. After the party you went back to your digs, presumably in the early hours of the morning, and were still under the influence of whatever you thought had been slipped into your drink. Then someone broke in and doped you with truth drug. It was after that, after I’d spoken to you, that you went back to the house to rescue the girl and that’s when the shooting started. How did you get there?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Patrick answered after another silence.

  ‘Why did you feel she needed rescuing?’

  ‘I’m not sure now. It might have been because she was around during the party – or rather binge.’

  ‘Around?’

  ‘Saying she was hungry and why wasn’t there anything to eat. I got her out of the room, made her some supper, and told her to go to bed.’

  ‘While her mother was high on God knows what and having it away with any number of men.’

  ‘Drink and drugs yes, but as far as sex went only with Hulton.’

  ‘Not you?’ I enquired ruthlessly, not knowing how much he could recall of what he had told me the previous day.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. The situation’s clearer to me now. She was too scared of him to go with anyone else.’

  I left that subject, thankfully, and said, ‘Why didn’t you get Leanne out of the place while the party was going on if you were worried about her safety?’

  ‘I didn’t think she was in the kind of danger you’re thinking about. A bad situation for any child, I know, but she was used to such happenings and had only come downstairs because she was hungry. And at that stage I didn’t know anyone suspected me.’

  ‘It might follow then that when those people broke into your digs they said something to you that made you think everyone at the house was in danger, not just Leanne.’

  Patrick shook his head. ‘If they did I can’t remember what it was.’

  ‘Why didn’t you phone Greenway? They must have left your mobile behind because I rang you.’

  ‘It was my work mobile I had with me – which is fixed up so that your calls are automatically forwarded. I still have it with me. Mine’s in my locker at HQ.’

  ‘In that case, with that literally at your fingertips, why didn’t you call out the cavalry instead of going back to the house on your own?’

  Patrick had a mouthful of coffee and then said, ‘You’re getting as good at interrogation as me. So if I ask you for something to eat before I answer any more questions you refuse, eh?’

  We eyeballed one another. He hadn’t exactly been joking.

  ‘I don’t know why I didn’t call Greenway,’ Patrick then said. ‘But if it wasn’t because I was sozzled and had forgotten the codes I might have been hoping I could salvage the job even at that late stage.’

  ‘Please tell me what your rôle was as far as this woman was concerned, your undercover rôle, I mean.’

  ‘I was brought in by someone who penetrated the gang years ago and who worked as a kind of Bloke Friday; driving their cars, fixing things and so forth. He then had a faked road accident and was pulled off the job. I’d been introduced as an ex-serviceman with a grudge against this country after being injured and invalided out who had plenty of specialized knowledge about MoD installations and weapon stores and wanted a job. The idea was that she’d find me – well – attractive and confide in me.’

  I stood up. ‘I’ll fix you something to eat.’

  The kitchen was on the ground floor, reached through a wide archway from the dining area, this part of the house being mostly open plan. This was a pity as I could have done with a door to shut right now. Mind a blank I found myself looking into the fridge. Yes, that’s right, lunch. Bread rolls, tomatoes, ham, butter . . . I took a double handful of stuff to the nearest work top and dumped it all down, tears dripping on to the pack of rolls.

  I became aware of Patrick standing in the archway.

  ‘It’s called baby blues,’ I told him, or rather gulped. ‘Quite common and I had it after Vicky was born. Take no notice of me.’

  ‘She didn’t,’ Patrick said.

  ‘What, confide in you? That’s a shame,’ I said brightly after a big sniff.

  ‘No, find me attractive.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She preferred hairy men.’

  I stared at him. ‘Hairy men!’

  ‘Yes, Hulton’s like a yak. It was rumoured that he carries a gun hidden under all the fur.’

  I really thought for a moment that he was having me on but he came over and solemnly dried my tears on his handkerchief.

  ‘I think I’ll put smoked salmon and cream cheese in the rolls,’ I said with a silly laugh. ‘And we’ll have a glass of wine with it.’ Then I said, ‘Did you try to make yourself attractive to her?’

  Patrick kissed the end of my nose. ‘No, but don’t tell himself.’

  ‘I forgot to wish you a belated happy birthday. Your presents are upstairs.’

  Which were a bottle of his favourite single-malt whisky and a large framed photograph of George, his horse.

  ‘Greenway told me that Hulton wasn’t among the dead,’ I said later after we had eaten and Patrick had slept for an hour and a half.

  ‘I can’t remember seeing him when I went back but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in the house. Or he might have either left the previous night or did a runner when the trouble started.’

  ‘Would he have killed Pangborne if she’d had sex with another man?’

  ‘Hulton’ll kill anything.’

  I was just going to ask Patrick if he thought the man guilty of the murders when a car drew in.

  ‘It’ll be your parents,’ I said. ‘Do you want to talk to them alone?’

  ‘No, by no means,’ Patrick replied emphatically.

  Dreading any awkwardness I went down to let them in. Elspeth delightedly commandeered the latest addition to the family who had just been given a feed and was wide awake. John said nothing, other than to greet me, and led the way upstairs.

  There was a little general conversation; the ongoing police investigation into Blanche’s murder, the building progress, the weather, and I stuck it out, unwilling to leave the room to make tea and thereby abandon Patrick with them. I could understand their concern but although they love him dearly they are not the sort of people to be pleased by anything they regard as a drop in standards so, from their point of view, were facing family disaster.

  Then John said, ‘This job of yours seems to be getting totally out of hand.’

  ‘No assignment goes strictly to plan,’ Patrick told him.

  ‘Are you under suspicion for these murders?’

  ‘Unofficially, yes.’

  I heard Elspeth gasp.

  ‘But as you can see I’m not under arrest,’ Patrick went on. ‘I can’t water this down for you but feel you ought to know that I was sent in to try to bring to justice a woman and her gang who were international criminals; killers and thieves. Someone, somehow, must have suspected me. I was drugged and dumped in a lane behind the house and a person unknown must have put the gun in my hand that had been used to commit the murders so I would get the blame. It was my gun. I hadn’t fired it. I know when I’ve fired a gun because my right wrist aches slightly for a few hours afterwards, a legacy of old injuries. My memory is returning but I still don’t have the full mental picture because of the drugs. That’s all I can tell you. It’s the truth and, frankly, Dad, I don’t need you coming here wearing your dog collar and with a face as long as a fiddle. I do need your support, a prayer perhaps or a ble
ssing so that I don’t feel so bloody wretched about trying to get a child away from danger only to have her shot in my arms.’

  I left the room to put the kettle on. He did not need my presence. Not only that, he had remembered being dumped out the back, something that I had not mentioned along with other details at Greenway’s suggestion. When I returned with the tea things I rather got the impression that a prayer had been said and a blessing administered – verified by Patrick later – because the atmosphere was much more relaxed and Elspeth was smiling broadly as she talked to Mark in her lap.

  ‘We should have helped you with that,’ she said to me. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t like to come to dinner tonight, would you? Only we’ve asked James and Joanna as he’s managing to have a couple of days off and it’s a bit fogeyish for them with just us two.’

  ‘Fogeyish?’ John queried. ‘Is that a word?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ his wife declared. ‘Besides, someone’s given us a huge chicken. Folk are so generous, you know. And as we were saying just now, the builders have finished making a mess indoors and have cleaned up as best they can so if we all turn to for an hour or so now to do a bit of hoovering and dusting I think we can unseal the dining and living rooms and use them this evening. That’s if it’s all right with you two. I mustn’t forget that it’s your house now.’

  ‘It’ll always be home to you,’ I said, as ever in total admiration of her tactics.

  FIVE

  Nothing further was said about the shootings – the Carricks remaining tactfully silent on the subject – until later that day after dinner when Patrick’s parents had retired for the night. We were seated in front of a blazing log fire – which was needed as it was snowing outside – in the living room of the rectory and by candlelight, Elspeth having completely forgotten that there was no power, water, or central heating reconnected yet in the old part of the house.

  Patrick gave James Carrick a rueful smile. ‘I’m innocent until proven guilty,’ he observed. ‘But Greenway told me to surrender my passport and stay in Hinton Littlemoor.’

  ‘You’ve been debriefed, I take it,’ Carrick said.

  ‘Not in so many words. I’m not being told too much as he wants to see how much I recollect on my own. He’s coming here the day after tomorrow accompanied by what he described as ‘colleagues’, by which time I’m supposed to have rid my system of all the dope. Rightly or wrongly he was handling me with kid gloves at the time and what he really meant was that I’ll be grilled by people from Complaints. I’m forbidden to investigate this myself, on pain of dismissal.’

  ‘You’re actually suspended then.’

  ‘Oddly enough, no. I think Richard Daws might have had something to do with that.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t know what. You might let me know if a guy by the name of Jethro Hulton turns up on your patch – that’s one of the names he goes by, anyway.’

  ‘He’s the one with drugs baron friends in Colombia, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Hardly likely to be found opening a church fête in Farrington Gurney then.’

  ‘Now you mention it, no.’

  ‘He’s not been out of jail that long, if I remember correctly. Served five years for his part in a bullion robbery. The prosecution couldn’t make it stick that he’d masterminded that and other crimes of a similar nature.’

  ‘The difficult bit’s getting people to testify against them,’ Joanna commented. At one time she had been Carrick’s sergeant. ‘What else do we know about this character?’

  Patrick said, ‘Born 1970, five feet nine inches tall, thickset, brown eyes, swarthy complexion, usually heavily bearded and also grows his hair long. He walks in a strange hunched-over manner, possibly as a result of a back injury, which makes him look shorter. In his youth he served three years of a life sentence for murder in Mexico but was busted out of a prison van taking him to another jail by cronies and fled to Europe. He’s connected to all kinds of rackets but as Joanna said, it’s getting the charges to stick or even grab the bastard in the first place. Part of my brief was to manoeuvre him into a situation where he could be arrested, along with the woman.’

  ‘A sting operation then.’

  ‘If necessary.’

  ‘Could he have recognized you from something that you worked on in the past and busted your cover?’ Carrick said.

  ‘No, I’ve never come within a mile of the bloke before. He’s a common crook, not someone to interest MI5.’

  ‘Might Hulton have murdered these people?’

  ‘He could well have decided to turn over to a new page of his life and tidy up the clutter. That’s exactly how his mind works. We’ll have to see what forensics turns up.’

  The DCI smothered a yawn and said, ‘In the meantime you could always have a go at the murder in the vestry case to keep your hand in. We don’t appear to be getting anywhere with it.’

  ‘OK,’ Patrick said.

  ‘I was only joking!’

  ‘I’ll make your tea for you,’ Patrick wheedled.

  ‘Earl Grey for preference,’ Carrick said after a few moments. ‘There’s a little shop in Green Street that sells estate teas.’

  It seemed staggering to me that any kind of official permission would be forthcoming on this proposal but the following morning, a full twenty-four hours before Commander Greenway was due to arrive for the debriefing, he rang to inform Patrick that he was extending his permitted area of freedom of movement to a twenty-mile radius of the village. There was then a call from a superintendent at the Avon and Somerset force’s HQ at Portishead, near Bristol, acknowledging Patrick’s temporary secondment to Bath CID and informing him that an official letter was on its way. He made it clear that he, Patrick, would take orders from Detective Chief Inspector Carrick and have no authority over anyone. He emphasized that the arrangement was purely temporary.

  In receipt of the news of this development I said, ‘Patrick, I don’t think you’ve really thought this through.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It’s already a bit difficult for your parents and now you’re going to be crawling all over the parish breathing down the necks of the locals, some of them their close friends – while you yourself are under some kind of investigation for murder.’

  ‘I don’t think Greenway’s too bothered about offending people round here.’

  ‘No, I appreciate that, but you should be!’

  ‘I am. And there’s also a lot of folk here who would like me to follow in Dad’s footsteps and even take over from him one day. This’ll be a good test of sentiments. It might even scare them into not telling me any porkies.’

  Are men’s brains weirdly, drastically and differently wired to women’s? Oh, yes.

  ‘So where do I fit into all this?’ I enquired grumpily, having realized, with a sinking feeling, that I ought to be involved.

  He considered and then said, ‘There might be room in my briefcase for a nursing mother.’

  ‘I’m not now, thank you.’

  ‘OK . . . What shall we call it then?’

  ‘Tea-buyer and squeeze-of-the-moment?’

  ‘I’ll go for that.’

  Before further consulting with James Carrick we visited the scene of the crime with a view to calling on John and Elspeth afterwards to give them the news. The church was unlocked, as it was normally during the day and there were no longer any restrictions of movement. (The entire building had been closed for just under a week while scenes-of-crime personnel had gone over every inch of it.) I knew that the bishop of Bath and Wells had paid a private visit and prayers had been said, the feeling being that too much of a ‘song and dance’, as Elspeth had put it, would only heighten the sense of tragedy and get the story in all the papers again, thus attracting yet another dose of gawpers.

  John was in the church, up by the altar laying a clean white cloth on it. I heard Patrick sigh as he went forward. Despite present
and past difficulties there is a close bond between them but I knew he was not looking forward to this encounter. Hearing movement, his father looked round as Patrick approached.

  ‘Any good news?’ he asked bluntly, his voice carrying effortlessly to where I was standing near the door.

  Patrick came straight to the point. ‘I’m to assist James with the murder here until ordered otherwise. I thought you ought to be the first to know.’

  John said nothing and went back to what he was doing. Then without turning he said. ‘Your mother and I have a very good relationship with everyone in this parish.’

  Except for the black magic practitioners, one imagined.

  ‘I’m fully aware of that,’ Patrick replied. ‘And I sincerely hope nothing I do changes that.’

  His father spun round and barked, ‘It had better not, Patrick!’

  He turned his back on the pair of us.

  ‘It’s no good, I can’t concentrate on the job while he’s here,’ Patrick whispered when he rejoined me. ‘We’ll have to come back later.’

  ‘Coffee with your mother then?’ I suggested.

  ‘Oh – all right.’

  ‘You don’t have to knock!’ Elspeth exclaimed, answering the door of the annex.

  ‘Well, I’ve just taken a full broadside from Dad and holed below the waterline,’ Patrick said with a wry grin as we followed her into the kitchen. ‘If the rigging goes as well . . .’

  ‘Oh, he’s like a bear with a sore head this morning. It’s this thing about women bishops. He seems to think that if we eventually get one here everyone’ll have to start calling God Madam.’ She paused in carrying the kettle across to the sink. ‘But John doesn’t usually take things out on you.’

  ‘No, I’d just told him that I’m going to be helping James with our murder inquiry.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I admit he was half joking when he asked me but, as you know, the man’s always overworked and hasn’t really got anywhere with the case at all. He seems to think that because I’m an insider of the village I might be able to solve the case.’