by Ann Granger
At that moment, a buzz signalled that the patient in the next bed had rung for attention. Sally’s visitor froze again. Rapid footsteps heralded the approach of a nurse. Soon, voices were speaking, patient and nurse, right beside the visitor in the beanie hat, only the curtain between them. That was too close for comfort. The pillow was dropped back on the chair. The visitor slipped between the drawn curtains and out of the ward, walking rapidly away down the corridor.
The nurse attending to the patient who had summoned help saw, from the corner of her eye, a dark shape flit across her vision. She frowned, murmured, ‘One moment!’ to her patient, and pulled aside Sally’s curtains and bent over the girl in the bed.
Sally slept on undisturbed. The nurse was satisfied.
But someone else wasn’t. Tom Palmer, having sat at home and brooded about Sally’s accident, had decided he had to do something. He’d drive to the hospital and visit her, satisfy himself she was on the mend. Jess had phoned him in the afternoon to tell him she’d seen and spoken to Sally. But that wasn’t good enough. He had to see her for himself.
The hospital was full of those muffled sounds that echo through the corridors at the end of the day. Voices were pitched low. An elderly woman in a pink dressing gown was being wheeled along. There were a few visitors, either arriving or leaving, and no one took any notice of Tom. He didn’t approach anyone for directions, because Jess had told him which ward Sally was in, and he set out confidently.
But as he approached the open doors with a view of occupied beds beyond, he saw, to his surprise, a figure slip out of the ward into the corridor in a manner that struck him as decidedly furtive. It was androgynous in appearance, wearing jeans and trainers, with a dark, leather-look jacket and a beanie pulled well down. The figure, exiting the ward, turned first in Tom’s direction and then immediately spun round and made off at a brisk pace away from him.
‘Hey!’ called Tom instinctively.
The response from the receding figure was an increase in pace. Tom dashed into the ward and collided with an irate nurse.
‘Did you shout out there in the corridor?’ she demanded. ‘Many of our patients are asleep—’
‘Dr Palmer!’ Tom said, dragging out his official pass. ‘I don’t work here. I work—’ He stopped himself saying that his work was mostly in the morgue. Any patient overhearing might think he was up here hunting for bodies, like Dr Frankenstein’s Igor.
The nurse, after a quick glance at his pass, understood. ‘Yes, yes, Dr Palmer. What can we do for you?’
‘I believe a patient named Sally Grove is on this ward. Has she had a visitor? Very recently, in the last few minutes.’
Uncertainty showed in the nurse’s eyes. ‘Well, I’m not sure. I was busy with another patient. I thought I saw someone leave. As a matter of fact, I did check on Sally, because a police officer was here earlier . . .’
But Tom had already darted past her and found Sally in the bed nearest the door. He bent over her anxiously. ‘Sally? It’s Tom Palmer. Can you hear me?’
To his relief, Sally mumbled, albeit incoherently, and then her eyelids flickered and opened. She looked up at him in confusion.
‘Tom?’
‘It’s OK,’ Tom said quickly. ‘Take it easy. I’ll be back in a minute or two.’
He spun round and hissed to the nurse, ‘Call Security. Suspected intruder, slim build, leather jacket and woollen hat. Could be male or female.’
He hastened out into the corridor and down it in the direction he’d seen the visitor go. But there was no sign of that slim, dark figure and he realised that, whoever it had been, he or she had had time to reach an exit. There was one ahead of him. He hurried through it and looked around. It was night outside now and the artificial light provided gave sufficient illumination for traffic and pedestrians without allowing positive identification. Colours faded to a monochrome. There were dark figures all over the place. But then he saw one that was running away from the hospital building and had already covered some distance. Visitors didn’t leave a hospital at a run, in his experience.
Tom dashed in pursuit, but the figure had vanished, apparently into one of the car parks. They were all fairly full. It was a popular visiting time. He ran up and down a few lines of vehicles, but the figure had disappeared. Frustrated, Tom returned to the hospital.
Security, in the form of one burly man and another, who was wiry and nervous-looking, had arrived now. He quickly explained the situation. While the two men set off to search the building, Tom took out his mobile and rang Jess Campbell.
Jess and Ian had finished their meal and moved on to coffee when Jess’s phone rang.
‘Sorry,’ she said, and looked to see who was calling. ‘It’s Tom,’ she added.
‘Oh, for crying out loud!’ exclaimed Carter. ‘Can’t he manage for one evening?’ Then he saw that Jess was looking serious, and his expression sharpened. ‘What?’ he demanded.
‘Tom went to visit Sally Grove, and it seems there may have been an intruder, trying to get to her. From Tom’s description, it sounds very like the same person Biddle saw running down the road after Sally’s accident.’
Within forty-five minutes the ward sister’s worst fears were confirmed and a uniformed officer stood guard outside the ward where Sally lay.
Chapter 14
The examination of Sally’s photos had taken on a new urgency, and they got to work early to begin. But it quickly proved frustratingly uninformative.
‘Trees,’ said Ian Carter. ‘And more trees.’
‘She specialises in painting trees,’ Jess explained.
‘I thought artists set up their easels or took their sketchpads out with them into the countryside?’ said Phil Morton.
‘Sally doesn’t. She takes photos on her mobile phone and goes home and, if she likes one, she makes a painting out of it.’
‘Run through them again!’ ordered Carter.
They stood in a little group before DS Nugent’s beloved computer as, once again, the sequence of photos taken by Sally Grove in Crooked Man Woods on the day of the murder appeared on the screen.
‘Most of them are pretty good shots,’ said Nugent. ‘Until you get to the last ones. She seems to have gone a bit wild then and taken anything. Some of it is out of focus, and some of it is skew-whiff.’
‘That was when she panicked,’ Jess told him. ‘She thought if the mystery person saw she was taking photos, they’d clear off.’
‘If he was up to no good, isn’t it more likely he’d try and grab the phone there and then?’ argued Carter. ‘Why wait and go to all the risk and trouble of knocking her off her bike later?’
‘Because Sally was mistaken. The mystery visitor to the woods hadn’t seen her snapping away among the trees. He didn’t know anything about it until Tom got talking to her in the library and drew attention to the subject of the paintings. She explained to him about being in the woods and hearing something spooky.’
‘So the murderer was in the library and—’
Nugent exclaimed, ‘There’s someone!’
They all leaned forward and peered at the screen. ‘Where?’ demanded Jess. ‘Can you zoom in on it, Dave?’
‘There’s someone standing by that tree trunk,’ muttered Carter. ‘You can only see half of the outline, but I think it’s a woman.’
‘It might be a thin man,’ warned Jess. ‘It’s not Tom Palmer, although he was in the woods that morning.’
‘And it’s not Carl Finch. He was broader than that, altogether beefier. That’s a woman, for my money, but we can’t see any detail of her. She has her back to the camera, but where is she looking?’
‘Towards one of the paths, or he or she’s standing on the side of one of the paths with his or her back to the trees. But the image is too fuzzy. The phone wasn’t being held steady. I still think that could be a thin man,’ Jess argued.
Further efforts by Nugent to improve the image proved fruitless.
They all stepped back from the com
puter and stared at one another.
‘Well?’ said Carter in exasperation. ‘This is supposed to be a team effort! Perhaps someone can come up with some suggestion?’
‘Team effort,’ Jess repeated softly. ‘Yes, you’re right, sir, that’s exactly what this has been!’
‘Go on,’ he said tersely.
‘Didn’t you say, right at the outset of this, that someone was playing games?’
‘I did.’ Carter nodded.
‘They’ve all been giving us the runaround. I’ve said so from the beginning!’ Morton put in aggressively. ‘They’re playing us for a set of idiots!’
Jess said slowly, ‘Possibly some of them.’ She turned to Carter. ‘It’s that Renault belonging to Finch. It’s ridiculous that we can’t find it. It has to be in the area. Someone’s got it hidden. That has to be the answer.’
Morton said diffidently, ‘I’ve got an idea. I don’t know if it’s haring down the wrong track but, well, it might be worth a try.’
‘Go on, Sergeant,’ Carter ordered.
‘That woman, Tessa Briggs, she lives on a big property. It’s not the size it was when it was a farm, but it’s still a fair amount of land. When the place was a farm it was called Crooked Man Farm, the same name as the woods. So I reckon, if we consulted an old map showing the various agricultural holdings in the locality, we might find that the farmland once extended right down to the edge of the woods. There could be an old track from the woods to the farmyard. It could be disused now and overgrown but if someone knew where it was—’
‘An old ordnance survey map of the area, that’s what we need!’ Jess burst out.
‘There must be a set of those for Gloucestershire somewhere in the building,’ Carter said. ‘And unless they’ve been updated very recently, they will show Crooked Man Farm as it was before Briggs sold off most of it.’
The maps were indeed there, but it still took a while to find them. When they had been run to earth and the appropriate one spread out for inspection, they all bent over it eagerly.
‘There you go!’ said Jess triumphantly. ‘There’s the farm, and there’s the woods. As the crow flies, it’s scarcely more than half a mile across the fields from the boundary of the woods to the house where Tessa Briggs still lives.’
Morton pointed at the map. ‘The farmyard buildings are used to garage her car and, apparently, there’s a workshop that was once used by her former husband. But this big piece of land behind the house still belongs to her. She lets people graze their horses on it and provides stabling for them in the yard. There’s an old barn – more of a large shed – about here’ – he tapped the map – ‘in the field where the horses graze. It’s less than a quarter of a mile from the house and, according to this map, not much more from that to the woods. The land dips down to where the house is, and the woods are probably just over this ridge. But, for all that, you should be able to see the tips of the trees on a clear day from the house.’
They straightened up and looked at one another.
‘We’ll need a search warrant,’ Carter said. ‘In theory, Mrs Briggs should have no objection to us looking in a disused outbuilding on her property. But she’s a lady who knows her rights – especially if she’s got something to hide. We can’t risk giving her time to move the car, if it is there.’
‘So you’re back!’ Tessa greeted them. She stared at Jess. ‘You’ve come along, too, I see. Usually, you just send the sergeant there to talk to me.’
She stood in the yard in working clothes, including her grubby gilet and boots, arms folded, and Fred in attendance at her side. The grey horse was tethered by the stables and, judging by the brush in Tessa’s hand, she had been busy grooming him.
‘We haven’t come today just to talk, Mrs Briggs. We’ve come to take a look around the outbuildings on your property. We have a search warrant.’ Jess held it out.
Tessa took it and scanned it briefly before handing it back. ‘Go ahead!’ she said briefly.
There was a note of resignation in her voice. Jess thought in triumph, we’re going to find the car! She knows that, and she can’t prevent it.
‘We’ll begin with the barn and the stables here,’ she said.
‘Then give me a minute to put Misty back in the paddock.’
As she was being so co-operative, they waited while Tessa untethered the grey and led him past them to the meadow beyond. When she returned, she said briefly, ‘All yours.’
They started with the barn Tessa used as a garage but, predictably, they found nothing unexpected, only her jeep and some sacks of pony nuts and chaff. There was a work bench in one corner with some cobwebbed, stained paint pots. Tessa stood watching them, her arms folded defensively. The collie, Fred, had come to press himself against her legs and looked up at her anxiously.
‘We’d like to look in that other building over there, in the meadow,’ Jess said.
A curious expression crossed Tessa’s face, half a smile and half a grimace of resignation. ‘Go on, then.’
‘You know what we’re looking for, I think, Mrs Briggs.’
‘Do I? What if I say I don’t?’
‘I believe you do,’ Jess told her gently. ‘That’s why we brought the search warrant.’
‘Don’t tell us,’ Morton put in, ‘that you don’t know what’s in your own shed there.’
‘I might not. It’s not in use these days. But that isn’t going to wash with you, is it?’ Tessa took a deep breath. ‘Am I allowed to make a phone call?’
‘You’re not under arrest, Mrs Briggs. Do you feel you need a lawyer?’
‘I’m not intending to phone my solicitor; at least, not yet. It’s someone else.’
Jess considered her. ‘Perhaps better not. I’d rather you came with us to the shed.’
The three horses threw up their heads and watched curiously as the little group of people made a slow but inexorable progress across the meadow, Fred running back and forth around the humans, as if he wanted to herd them.
The building was dilapidated but it still had its double doors, and they were padlocked. Jess peered through a gap in the planks. A large shape, covered with a tarpaulin, could be distinguished in the dim interior.
‘If you don’t have a key to this padlock on you, Mrs Briggs, perhaps you’d fetch it from the house? Sergeant Morton will accompany you. Please don’t say it’s lost. We’ll break in if you do.’
Tessa said nothing, only turned away with a sullen expression and set off back across the meadow, Phil Morton following close behind and Fred the collie circling them both anxiously.
When they returned with the key and the doors were pulled open, dusty air and a strong odour of ancient hay and other animal foodstuffs once stored here filled their nostrils. Jess stifled a sneeze and Morton took out a handkerchief and blew his nose noisily. ‘I’ve got an allergy,’ he muttered. ‘This won’t do it any good!’
The empty space beneath the steepled roof, and the silence, suggested a deserted church, but without pews or pulpit. The building contained only the draped shape of a car. Morton dragged away the tarpaulin and the Renault was revealed, neatly parked.
‘We believe this to be the car driven by Carl Finch,’ Jess said.
‘Do you now? Well, I’m not going to argue about it.’ Tessa sounded quite resigned, but there was still a trace of the old combativeness, mostly in her attitude. She stared Jess in the face. ‘How did you work it out? I mean, that it was here?’
‘The car had to be somewhere, Mrs Briggs, and not too far from the woods. We consulted a map.’
‘Simple as that, eh? Oh, well, if I’d left it where it was, you’d have found it. So it comes to the same thing, in the end, doesn’t it? I’ve only delayed things.’
‘You’ve tried to delay our investigations from the start, Mrs Briggs.’
‘Not much good at it, though, am I? You got to the woods ahead of me and now you’re here. Fred! Leave that!’ The collie was scratching at the floor in the corner of the building.
‘Probably smells of rats,’ said Tessa. ‘We used to get them in here in the old days, when the feed was stored here.’
‘We’d like you to come with us now, Mrs Briggs, for a formal interview on record.’
‘Can’t I just make a statement?’
‘You made one of those before, Mrs Briggs, in the woods, when the body was found.’
‘And it was a load of codswallop. Yes, I know.’ Tessa swallowed.
‘And this new statement will be recorded, for use as evidence.’
‘All very official, eh? Then I’ll have to come with you. Now do I get the one phone call, to my solicitor?
‘If you wish.’
‘Better have him there, or Hal will kick up a rumpus.’
‘Who is Hal?’ asked Jess.
‘My ex-husband. He turned up, first time in years. He’d heard about Carl, you see. Bad news always travels fast. What about the car?’
‘It will be taken away for forensic examination. You may have cleaned it up, but if there’s the smallest fingerprint or hair, or anything, Forensics will find it.’
‘Bully for them!’ snapped Tessa. ‘And Fred? I can’t leave him here for an indefinite length of time. Can we drop him off at the Old Nunnery?’
‘I’d rather we didn’t call by there,’ Jess said.
‘All right. Well, Ron Purcell lives about a quarter of a mile down the road, towards Weston St Ambrose. ‘Perhaps he’d look after Fred for a few hours. He’s a local man,’ she added. ‘He used to play in the cricket team with my former husband – and with Carl. Everyone knew everyone else in Weston St Ambrose, in the old days.’
Morton remembered that thin, ascetic-looking man gazing out at the landscape. You could have told me a lot more than you did, if you’d wanted to, he thought. But, like she says, they all know one another – and they all stick together.
Aloud, he asked, ‘Do you really want your neighbour to know that you’ve been taken in for questioning, Mrs Briggs?’