Skeleton Plot

by J M Gregson

  Lambert wondered as Jim Simmons led them into a quiet room at the front of the house whether this little cameo had again been designed to present the farmer as a pillar of happy family life, a man who could not possibly have been responsible for dark deeds twenty years earlier. As he had agreed with his chief constable on the previous afternoon, it was part of his job to be cynical, wasn’t it?

  He smiled away Simmons’s apologies for keeping them waiting and said, ‘We need a further talk with you about the body buried on your land in 1995. After talking to a variety of people who were around at that time, we now know a lot more than when we spoke with you six days ago.’

  He made it sound like a warning, as though they had spent the entire six days since they had last seen him assembling material which would prove him a liar and thus the leading suspect for this crime. Jim Simmons said defensively, ‘It wasn’t my land in 1995. And it wasn’t my land when those remains were dug up last week.’

  ‘Technically correct. Does that matter to you? Let’s agree that the body of a healthy young woman, Julie Grimshaw, was buried just inside the boundary of this farm almost exactly twenty years ago. Is that satisfactory?’

  Jim wondered whether to query the assertion that Julie had been a healthy young woman, on the grounds that at the time of her death she had been seriously into drugs and in danger of sinking into addiction. But that would argue more detailed knowledge of her condition and habits than he cared to admit to here. He said carefully, ‘I think I told you everything I knew about this matter when you were here last. I was hoping that you were now close to an arrest.’

  ‘Were you, indeed? Well we aren’t, I’m afraid. We wouldn’t be here seeking further information if we were close to an arrest, Mr Simmons.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. I hope Julie is avenged, if that’s the right expression. We had our differences, but she should never have died like that.’

  ‘Those differences interest us, Mr Simmons. We’d like you to enlarge upon them. We’d like you to add to what other people have now told us. We need to hear your side of the story.’

  Jim glanced instinctively at the door he had shut so carefully when they came into this small, quiet room. How much did they know? What had other people told them about him and Julie? It was a police tactic, this exploitation of your ignorance, this making you tense by playing on your fear of what other people might already have told them. You might need to defend yourself against what they had said, or you might be better saying nothing – but then you might seem evasive, and that wouldn’t help you if, as they said, they were searching desperately for someone to arrest for this crime long gone. Dead and buried, that crime had been, he thought grimly, but it had now returned to disturb the lives of those who had shared those months with Julie Grimshaw in 1995. He said carefully, ‘I knew Julie quite well for a short period.’

  ‘No, Mr Simmons. You can do better than that. I believe you can remember more than you told us on the day after her bones had been discovered. Let’s say that more details have probably come back to you during the six days since we last spoke with you.’

  It was delivered in firm but superficially polite tones. It said, come clean with us now whilst there is still time, so that we do not need to treat you as a hostile witness. Jim wasn’t in court, but he felt at this moment very much as if Lambert were a prosecuting counsel. He said, ‘You were vague yourselves when you were questioning me about the skeleton on Sunday. We were all shocked.’

  ‘Perhaps. But you knew more than we did. We didn’t even know the identity of the victim. You pretended to be as ignorant as we were about how the body had come to be in the ground on your territory. It’s my belief that you must at least have suspected who this woman was.’

  Jim forced himself to take his time. He wasn’t used to dealing with words; he didn’t have to use them very often, nowadays. But he knew he wasn’t bad with words when he needed them – just a little out of practice, perhaps. ‘I suppose I thought that skeleton might have been Julie’s – feared might be a better word. The thought hit me as soon as I heard about the discovery of bones there. That wasn’t because I knew anything about how they came to be there. It was because I knew a young woman who had disappeared suddenly at that time. When you hear that remains have been discovered all these years later, your thoughts naturally fly to who was around here at that time and who it might have been. Julie Grimshaw vanished from our lives during the summer of 1995. It was natural that my thoughts should fly to her.’

  ‘But you didn’t see fit to communicate her name to us last Sunday. We would have waited much longer for an identification if her distraught mother had not come to see us on Monday and provided us with a DNA sample for comparison.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. But it was less than twenty-four hours after the skeleton had been unearthed when you spoke with me on Sunday. My mind was reeling with the shock of finding out that a body had been buried near the boundary of this farm. And there were others who knew her, as well as me. I didn’t want to implicate them and open a can of worms. It was still possible then that the skeleton might have been that of a complete stranger, unknown to any of us.’

  Hook had established an easier relationship with this man than Lambert had achieved, at their previous meeting. They had similar backgrounds, with Hook having been a Barnardo’s boy and Simmons having been in care from twelve to sixteen. Bert now looked up from his notes and said, ‘Your initial instinct on Sunday was one of self-preservation, was it not, Jim?’

  Simmons looked at Hook’s rugged outdoor face suspiciously, then softened a little as he remembered their previous exchanges. ‘I told you I had a wild youth. I told you I’d got into fights and all sorts of scrapes at that time. I told you I’d had my share of girls and treated a lot of them badly. If a dead girl had been buried on our land at that time, I felt you were going to have me down as a leading suspect. Don’t you think it understandable that I would tell you as little as possible?’

  Hook allowed himself a relaxed, avuncular smile. ‘Understandable, perhaps, but ill-advised nonetheless, Jim. Withholding information leads to far more suspicion than revealing it, for the innocent. You are innocent in this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course I am.’

  ‘Then convince us of that by giving us all the help you can.’

  ‘I want to do that. Believe me I do.’

  ‘We’re policemen, Jim. We’re here as professionals. You need to make us believe you. Tell us about your own relationship with Julie Grimshaw. Tell us about how Andrew Burrell felt about her and treated her.’

  He looked up sharply with the mention of his contemporary; his wide brown eyes showed his alarm. ‘It was Andrew who brought her here. He had a thing going with her, for a while. I’m not quite sure how serious it was.’

  ‘But his parents thought it was serious, didn’t they? And they didn’t like it.’

  ‘No, they didn’t approve of Julie. We thought they were out of touch and didn’t understand youth, at the time.’ He shook his head and ran a hand briefly over his rather untidy brown hair. ‘Now that I’ve got kids of my own, I can imagine how they felt. You want to protect your kids, don’t you? Andrew was a young man by then and wanting to assert himself. But your kids are always kids to you, aren’t they? You feel the need to protect them, whatever age they are.’

  Hook reflected that this was a boy who had been placed in council care between the ages of twelve and sixteen and then left to make his own way in the world. Not much parental care there. But that probably made him even more anxious to do his best for his own children. Bert, the Barnardo’s boy who had fought his way through to his present professional position and a happy marriage, certainly felt extremely protective of his own two boys, now in their early teens. He knew he’d have to relax the bonds of love as they got older, but he knew also that he wasn’t going to find that easy, that he’d find Eleanor telling him firmly that he must let go. He felt suddenly quite close to this successful fa
rmer of almost his own age. He was unprofessional enough to hope deeply for a moment that they wouldn’t conclude the case with an arrest of Jim Simmons. He said quietly, ‘So the Burrells didn’t approve of Julie. Tell us all about that, please.’

  ‘I think they’d have been quite prepared to help her, if Julie had been prepared to accept help. Emily in particular was a very kind woman, and not at all the old fuddy-duddy we thought her at the time. And Daniel Burrell knew the score, far more clearly than we thought he did. There’s an arrogance about youth, isn’t there? It’s one of its least attractive qualities. I read that the other day and I agree with it, when I look back at those times.’

  ‘Tell us about Julie. She’s a murder victim and we need to know all we can about her. You knew her in the weeks before her death. There will be something which happened in those days which is directly linked to her killing.’

  Simmons looked shaken, as if he was confronting this thought for the first time. ‘I’d dabbled with drugs myself, like most of my set. I knew enough about them to realize immediately that Julie Grimshaw was a user. Not pot, like me, but coke or heroin. There was one day when she was completely out of it. I think Emily must have seen her on an occasion like that. From being sympathetic to a girl living in a squat and struggling with life, she turned right against her. I think she was frightened of what she saw and what might follow if things got worse. She’d never done drugs herself and the thought of horse and scag terrified her. She didn’t want Julie under her roof any more. I remember Emily using exactly that phrase.’

  ‘But it wasn’t solely the drugs, was it? Daniel and Emily were worried about Andrew’s relationship with Julie.’

  ‘Yes. I think for Andrew there was something romantic about Julie’s circumstances. He liked the idea of lifting her out of the squat and rescuing her from drugs and making her a pretty and successful young woman. There was a certain missionary zeal about his attitude when he brought her here. That’s another annoying thing about youth: you think you can work miracles where others have failed.’

  ‘But his parents didn’t want this?’

  Jim Simmons frowned. He didn’t want to denigrate Daniel and Emily, both of whom had been very good to him. ‘They wanted to help Julie. But she didn’t seem prepared to help herself. She turned up here completely stoned once, and I think they saw that as a direct challenge to them. Daniel wasn’t going to stand for that, for a start. Farmers are very proprietorial on their own patch, you know. They’re used to ruling the roost and not being challenged. It’s probably something to do with the place where you work also being the place where you live.’ He grinned suddenly at Hook, recognizing the implications of this for himself. ‘But the thing which really mattered to Dan and Emily was Andrew’s relationship with Julie. They didn’t want their son lining himself up with a druggie – a girl who might even become an addict. I could see their position at the time. I can sympathize with it a lot more now, when I have kids of my own.’

  Again the emphasis on himself as a family man, on his feeling for his children. Genuine emotion, or an attempt to divert attention from the man he had been in 1995? Bert said, ‘So they feared that Andrew might be dragged into the world of drugs by Julie Grimshaw?’

  ‘I doubt whether they really feared that. I think they just felt he was taking on more than he could handle with Julie. They might have been right. No one wants an addict in their family, or even close to them. Addicts can ruin other lives as well as their own.’

  ‘So what did the older Burrells do about the situation?’

  ‘They said they didn’t want her in the house again. I think there’d been some sort of incident. I didn’t see it. I was out working the land at the time. But I think Julie was stoned and insulted Emily. Dan wasn’t going to stand for that.’

  Hook smiled grimly. ‘Jim, I need you to be very honest now about people I know you admire. Do you think either Dan or his wife did anything more violent than that? Do you think either of them might have had any involvement in Julie’s death? Not necessarily a planned or even a deliberate involvement. We could be looking at manslaughter rather than murder. Do you think one or both of them might have been provoked into violence by her conduct or by her relationship with their son?’

  ‘No. I’ve thought about it during the last few days, as you might expect. But Emily simply wouldn’t have been capable of that sort of reaction. And Daniel, despite his demand to rule the roost here, could never have been violent towards a woman. He was old-fashioned in that respect. I’m sure when I first came here as a lad he’d cheerfully have thrashed me with a belt, if I’d stepped seriously out of line. That was the impression he gave me and I’m grateful for it now. I don’t deny that I was frightened of him at the time. But the fear was good for me: I might have gone seriously off the rails without it. But Daniel would no more have been capable of physical violence against Julie than his wife would, however much he might have wished her out of his sight for ever.’

  Simmons was breathing hard now, vehement in his description of his benefactors, determined to convince the CID men that the dead Emily and the man now in care at eighty-four had had no involvement in this death. His defence was the more convincing in that he must have known that it left him more exposed as a suspect in the case. As a young man not much older than Julie Grimshaw, who admitted to knowing her well at the time, Simmons was too intelligent not to know that he must be one of the CID candidates for murder.

  Lambert had never taken his eyes off the man during Hook’s gentler interrogation. He now said tersely, ‘The man most closely involved with Julie, according to your account, was Andrew Burrell. What was your relationship with him?’

  Jim was thrown for a moment by the question. It was a diversion from the themes they had been pursuing, the condition and behaviour of Julie Grimshaw when she had visited this farm twenty years ago. He had expected to be asked about Andrew and Julie, not about Andrew and himself. And he had expected the questions to come from Hook, not from this intense older man who he sensed was more hostile to him. ‘We were contemporaries. We got on all right.’

  ‘You can do better than that. Did you like each other?’

  ‘We didn’t dislike each other. We were two very different men. We were both young and both still finding out what we wanted to do in the world.’

  ‘Did you see yourselves as rivals for this farm?’

  ‘No. I think Daniel wanted to see it that way. I think he wanted to prod his son into thinking his inheritance was being taken away from him. And I was certainly conscious of taking over the role which Daniel and Emily had intended for their son. I felt in a difficult position. I enjoyed farming and I was being trusted with more and more of the day-to-day work and even the farming decisions, but I knew that the intention had been that the farm would pass to Andrew. There was tension between Andrew and his parents, but not really between Andrew and me. He came back from agricultural college without completing his course there; he’d decided that farming wasn’t for him.’

  ‘So you took over this place quite smoothly?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. I was in quite a difficult position, as I said. Andrew sometimes seemed to despise me, simply because I was interested in this place and in what he regarded as dull and menial work. And I regarded him as a wimp, because he wanted to go off and do an arts degree rather than taking this opportunity in the real world. I can see now that the world he’s working in is the real one for him, but when you’re young you think the path you want to tread is the only valid one.’

  ‘So you had your differences. Did you fall out with each other?’

  ‘No. We were very different personalities, so we weren’t likely to be close friends. But what happened here in 1994 and 1995 was opportune for both of us. I remember Andrew eventually saying to me after a row with his dad that it was a good thing that I was around. Daniel and Emily would channel the ambitions they’d had for him into my career here. If I played my cards right I’d get the farm, and he woul
dn’t resent it because it would get him off the hook of their expectations.’

  ‘You must have been glad to hear him saying those words.’

  Jim looked round at the small, comfortable room, at the prosperous farm he could glimpse through its single window. He thought of the other rooms beyond this one, of his wife and two children and the satisfaction he got from being in this ancient house and from working hard on this land. ‘It wasn’t as straightforward as you seem to be assuming it was. It took Daniel a long time to accept the idea that his son wasn’t going to take over. It took him several months to accept that I was a possible alternative. Emily liked me and was kind throughout my time here. I’m sure it was she who eventually sold the idea to Dan that I might take over here.’

  ‘So how do you get on with Andrew Burrell nowadays?’

  How persistent the senior man was! It was almost as if he knew that Andrew had phoned him on the previous day, asking him to keep quiet about Liam. But Lambert couldn’t know that Andrew had been in touch, surely? ‘We have very little to do with each other. He lives his life and I live mine. They don’t overlap at any point. His mother tried to keep us in touch, but she’s been gone for quite a while now.’

  ‘So you haven’t been in contact about this matter?’

  Jim felt his pulses quicken at that. Did they know about Andrew’s phone call to him? Had the man told them himself, without letting him know? He spoke as casually as he could. ‘Andrew rang me yesterday, as a matter of fact. Wanted to compare notes about the skeleton, now that we know who it is.’ He glanced at the two very different faces in front of him and forced a smile. ‘Only natural, I suppose; I’m sure you’d agree with that.’

  ‘What did you decide after you’d conferred with each other?’

  ‘Nothing. We were both shocked. We each knew as little as the other about how Julie’s body came to be where it was discovered.’ He wouldn’t mention Liam. He owed that much at least to Andrew.