Stone Dead

by Frank Smith

  Warming to her task, Grace leaned forward to emphasize her next words. ‘Now, the first thing I noticed was that, even though the clothes had all been jammed in together, they were not particularly wrinkled, which led me to believe that they had not been together in that state for very long. Do you see what I’m driving at, sir?’

  Paget opened his eyes and nodded. Was there a spark of interest there? Grace couldn’t be sure, but she hoped so.

  ‘The next thing I did was examine the inside of the drawers in the back bedroom, and I found fibres that we’ve since been able to match with some of Lisa’s underclothes, so they were in those drawers at some time or other.

  ‘And there were hairs, Lisa’s hairs, in the carpet, in the wardrobe, in fact they were all over that room. It had been vacuumed, but it’s very hard to get rid of hair, so I had no trouble finding it. I did find some of her hair in the front bedroom, but there wasn’t nearly as much of it as in the back bedroom. And then there were the marks on the floor beside the dressing-table. You see…’

  Grace stopped short as Paget suddenly held up his hand. ‘I think I get the picture,’ he said quietly, ‘but it would hardly stand up in court, would it?’

  Her heart dropped like a stone, and she could feel the blood rushing to her face. She should have listened to Charlie. She was making a fool of herself.

  ‘But I think you may be right,’ he said, and smiled. It transformed his face. Gone were the deep lines that made his face severe, and his eyes looked less flinty as he went on. ‘It wouldn’t stand up in court, but neither would most of the conclusions we reach. What you’ve just told me ties in with what a friend of Lisa’s told Tregalles yesterday. She said that Lisa was not getting along with Peter Foster, and she was thinking of leaving him.’

  He tapped the report. ‘I’ll have to read this later,’ he went on, ‘but is there anything else you want to point out now?’

  Relief swept through her. ‘There are a couple of things,’ she said, but even as she spoke he looked at his watch and stood up.

  ‘Fancy a bit of lunch, do you?’ he asked abruptly.

  Grace Lovett didn’t know quite what to say. The invitation was so completely unexpected. It didn’t fit the profile she’d built up of Paget in her mind at all. He’d always seemed so aloof, so unreachable, and rumour had it that he was very much a loner. Brusque, cold, a workaholic; that was Paget. But she found herself attracted to him despite all that.

  And now he’d asked her to lunch.

  Grace scrambled to her feet. ‘Yes, I do rather,’ she said somewhat breathlessly. ‘It’s so…’

  ‘Good,’ said Paget. ‘Bring your notes. I’ll see if Tregalles is free. I’d like him to hear this as well. You are on expenses while you’re out here, I presume?’

  NINE

  ‘I THINK SHE FANCIES YOU, sir,’ Tregalles said, grinning. They had returned from lunch, and Grace Lovett was on her way back into town.

  Paget grunted. ‘I doubt that very much,’ he said. ‘She was just doing her job, and I must say I like the way her mind works.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of her mind, exactly,’ Tregalles said. ‘But I do like the way the rest of her works.’

  Paget didn’t reply, but the sergeant was right in one respect at least: Grace Lovett was an attractive woman. But as for the other nonsense … Paget dismissed it out of hand. Tregalles would have his little joke.

  Audrey telephoned just after four to say that the man who had approached Olivia had not appeared that day at all. It was a relief in one way, but it only left the matter unresolved, and Tregalles would not rest easy until the man was caught.

  The diggers made their discovery ten minutes before they were due to finish for the day. Two pieces of luggage buried deep beneath a clump of winter heather.

  Paget was notified as soon as the discovery was made, and he, Tregalles and Ormside all trooped over to the garden to watch it being unearthed. They watched in silence as damp earth was brushed away and a large suitcase was pulled free. The second case was smaller; more like an overnighter.

  ‘They’re heavy, sir,’ said one of the men. His face was pale as he looked enquiringly at Paget. ‘Should I open them?’

  ‘You reckon he chopped her up before he buried her?’

  The words were spoken in a hushed whisper by one of the diggers, but Paget heard and couldn’t help wondering the same. Logic told him that the cases were too small to hold a body, but there could be more buried elsewhere.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and squatted down beside the larger case. It looked expensive. He brushed away the earth around the catches, and saw the engraved initials: L.R.

  He braced himself and opened it. Clothes. A woman’s clothes, and Paget had little doubt that they belonged to Lisa Remington. Something like a collective sigh escaped the watching men. He opened the overnight case, and found inside a collection of jewellery, cosmetics, and a handbag.

  The handbag bulged with virtually everything he would have expected Lisa Remington to carry with her: driving licence, credit cards, compact, lipstick, keys, Kleenex, money, and a miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends including two pens, odd scraps of paper, headache tablets, a packet of mints, and so on.

  No matter what, Lisa Remington would never have left the house willingly without this handbag, Paget thought.

  He rose to his feet. ‘Get this lot to the lab,’ he instructed Ormside, ‘and have someone guard the site tonight. We’ll resume digging in the morning. And you,’ he said to Tregalles, ‘had better come with me. I think Mr Foster is going to find this lot just a little harder to explain away.’

  * * *

  PETER FOSTER sat with his eyes closed, waiting. He sat on the same hard chair at the same wooden table, and the same silent, uniformed constable sat in the same corner of the room. He was exhausted. Physically, mentally, every possible way. He just wanted it to be over. No more lies; no more evasions; no more having to remember what he’d just said. Just tell the truth and have done with it.

  The trouble was, would they believe anything he said now? He’d tried so hard, but everything was coming apart. His nose began to run, and he could feel the prickle of sweat across his brow. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

  The man in the corner looked up. The suspect, he noted with distaste, was snuffling. He looked down at the floor again and wished they’d get on with it. He was hungry, and the canteen closed at eight.

  * * *

  ‘YOU HAVE ADMITTED burying the suitcase containing clothing belonging to Lisa Remington, together with an overnight bag containing her handbag and other personal items, Mr Foster,’ Paget said. ‘So will you tell me now where Lisa Remington is?’

  Foster shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said miserably.

  ‘Is Lisa Remington dead, Mr Foster?’

  ‘No! No—I mean I don’t know!’ Foster burst out. ‘She ran away. At least, I think she did. She must have.’

  ‘Why would she run away?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Wouldn’t you be scared if you’d just shot somebody accidentally?’

  ‘Accidentally, Mr Foster? How do you know that? Were you there?’

  Foster groaned. ‘I’ve already told you a million times that she was gone when I came home,’ he said. ‘But it stands to reason. There’s no other explanation.’

  ‘I think there is,’ Paget said. ‘I think that when you came home you found Lisa in bed with her lover. I think you took the shotgun and killed them both in a fit of rage. I think that you tried to cover up the murder by concealing the bodies, and inventing a tissue of lies to explain the absence of Miss Remington. That’s what the evidence suggests to me, Mr Foster.’

  ‘Then where is Lisa’s body?’ Foster shot back. ‘Tell me that!’

  ‘That’s what I’m asking you, Mr Foster.’

  ‘I told you what happened,’ Foster said dully. ‘Don’t you ever listen?’

  ‘Tell me again.’


  Foster shook his head helplessly. How many times did he have to go through this? he thought desperately. He cast a pleading look at Paget, but he found no comfort there in the cold and stony features.

  He sighed heavily. ‘As I said, it was about a week after I’d put the body down the well and cleaned up the place when I found Lisa’s handbag. It was down in a corner sort of hidden behind the coats in the front passageway, and it made me think.’ Foster leaned forward as he tried to make his point with Paget. ‘You see, Lisa never went anywhere without that bag, and when I saw it, and saw everything that was in it, I was afraid. Even if she’d been in a blind panic, she would have taken that with her. It had her keys, her money, everything in it.’

  Tears welled up in Foster’s eyes. ‘The only thing I could think of was that she had been taken away against her will. It was the only thing that made sense to me. But why? If it was for ransom—some people might think that because she was a top model, she had a lot of money—why hadn’t I heard anything? I didn’t know what to do. I’d spread the story about that Lisa was in France, but I’d always known that it wouldn’t be long before someone started asking questions. Constance, Lisa’s mother, was already suspicious.’

  Foster drew a deep breath and let it out again. ‘So, I decided to make it look as if Lisa had taken her handbag with her, and some clothes, so I picked out some things I thought she might wear, and put them in the case and buried it along with the other stuff you found. That way, it would look as if she’d left of her own accord.’ He spread his hands. ‘That’s it, I swear.’

  ‘What about Lisa’s clothes in your wardrobe?’ Paget asked.

  Colour rushed into Foster’s face. ‘What clothes?’ he asked, but he avoided Paget’s eyes.

  It had been a shot in the dark, based largely on Grace Lovett’s instincts, but it appeared to have scored a bull’s-eye, and he pressed home his advantage. ‘Miss Remington was sleeping in the back bedroom,’ he said flatly. ‘Why was that, Mr Foster?’

  Foster lifted his head and stared at Paget belligerently. ‘She wasn’t sleeping properly,’ he said, ‘so she moved in there. I offered to move, but she refused.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s all there was to it.’

  ‘It had nothing to do with the fact that she was about to leave you, then?’

  The colour deepened in Foster’s face. ‘I don’t know where you got that idea,’ he said, ‘but it’s a load of rubbish. Lisa and I were very happy together.’

  ‘That’s not what she’s been telling her friends.’

  Foster shrugged. ‘Believe what you like,’ he said sullenly. ‘You will anyway, but Lisa would never leave me. Never.’

  ‘Since we now know that Sean Merrick isn’t dead, who was it in that bed, Mr Foster? And how do you think he came to be there?’

  Foster blinked at the abrupt switch in direction. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘When I thought it was Merrick, I thought that he must have got in somehow without Lisa seeing him, got undressed and climbed into bed. It was the sort of grandstand play he would make. He thought he was God’s gift to women, and he only had to crook his finger to get Lisa back. He simply couldn’t get it through his thick head that she loved me.’

  ‘But it wasn’t Merrick, was it?’ Paget said softly. ‘So who was it? And more to the point, what was he doing in Lisa’s bed?’

  The colour in Foster’s face grew darker. He put his hands on the table in front of him, lifted himself from the chair and thrust his face at Paget. ‘If you’re suggesting what I think,’ he said menacingly, ‘then you’d better…’

  ‘I’d better what, Mr Foster?’ said Paget mildly. ‘And to make sure we understand each other, let me tell you what I am suggesting. I think that whoever the man was, he was Lisa’s lover, and I think you came home and found them together. And, I think you killed them both. Now then, sir, you can save us and yourself a lot of trouble if you tell us where you’ve hidden Lisa’s body.’

  Friday 5th April

  ‘IT’S ALL CIRCUMSTANTIAL,’ Alcott said glumly. He sat back in his chair and threw the report on his desk. A cloud of ash flew up from the ashtray and a fine grey blanket settled on the polished surface. ‘I don’t see anything there that tells me with absolute certainty that Lisa Remington is dead. I see all sorts of evidence suggesting that she’s dead, but nothing more.’

  Paget nodded. ‘Which is why I had to let Foster go again,’ he said wearily. He and Tregalles had hammered away at Foster until almost midnight, but they hadn’t been able to shake him. ‘I’m ninety-nine per cent certain that Lisa Remington is dead. I can feel it in my bones, but I can’t prove it. And yet all of the blood samples taken from the bedroom belong to the dead man. There is nothing to suggest that another person died there. So—assuming she is dead—I think she must have been killed elsewhere. I mean, why put one body down the well and not the other if they were both killed at the same time? God knows there was room enough.’

  ‘You’re still digging up the garden, I take it?’

  ‘That’s right. Foster swears we won’t find anything, but he’s changed his story so often I find it hard to believe anything he says.’

  ‘He took the mattress out to the tip,’ said Alcott slowly.

  ‘I thought of that,’ Paget told him, ‘and I’ve had men sorting through the rubbish, but they’ve had no luck so far. And his van was clean.’

  ‘Are we any closer to identifying the dead man?’

  ‘I’m hoping we’ll have some response on the dental records soon,’ said Paget, ‘but until then we’re at a dead end there.’

  ‘So, what’s next?’

  ‘I’m sending Tregalles to talk to this chap Tyson. Tom Tyson. He owns the farm next to Foster’s place, and I gather Lisa Remington put a spoke in his wheel when he tried to buy a bit of land from Foster. If Lisa did have a lover visiting her when Foster was away, Tyson might have seen him around the place. And I’m curious about Tyson’s son, Eric. The boy can’t speak, and he has a mental problem, but I’m told he and his father communicate quite well. The lad—hell, I call him a lad, but he’s twenty-two years old and as big as a barn door—seems to spend a lot of time roaming about the countryside, and it’s possible that he knows something if only we can communicate with him.’

  Alcott grunted. He had a meeting with Chief Superintendent Brock in less than an hour, and he was not looking forward to it. Brock lived by statistics: arrests, convictions, hours-per-case, overtime, and the bottom line. Graphs and charts covered the walls of his office. If it couldn’t be measured, counted, or plotted on a graph, Brock wasn’t interested. ‘Results, Alcott, results; that’s what I want. I’m not interested in explanations. That’s just another name for excuses. Give me something tangible I can take to the chief constable.’

  Alcott sighed. What could you expect from someone who’d never spent five minutes in the field? The man didn’t have a clue. A glorified accountant; that was Brock. Spent his entire career in Administration, and thought he knew it all. How he’d ever managed to land this job as chief superintendent was beyond …

  Paget coughed discreetly. ‘Was there anything else, sir?’

  Alcott shook his head. ‘No,’ he said wearily. ‘Just bring me something Mr Brock will understand. Bring me some results.’

  * * *

  THERE WAS A MESSAGE asking him to ring the pathologist when Paget arrived back at his desk.

  ‘We have a match,’ Starkie told him when he rang back. ‘We’ve identified your corpse. His name is David Gray, age thirty. Went missing March 12th. At least he was last seen on that date. Lived at 63A Runacre Road right here in Broadminster. As a matter of fact, Missing Persons tell me they had him on file all the time. Don’t you lot ever talk to one another?’

  Paget wasn’t going to let Starkie get away with that. ‘As a matter of fact, his name was mentioned earlier on,’ he said, ‘but when the corpse was identified as that of Merrick, we lost interest in Gray. Who identified him?’

  ‘If you mean has anyo
ne actually looked at him and said, “Yes, that’s David Gray,” then I have to say no one, because there are no distinguishing marks on what’s left of the body. But I’m satisfied it is Gray. Your people had a full-face photograph of him, and our computer mock-up fits the facial measurements exactly; eyes, ears, nose, mouth, etc., you know what I mean. Also, the dental records match, and the broken arm. Gray broke his arm seven months ago while playing squash, and his X-rays are still on file here at the hospital. They’re a perfect match. Satisfied?’

  ‘Sounds good to me, Reg. What about next of kin? Anyone spoken to them yet?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. I’ll have a full report over to you later in the day, but I’ve given you the main points.’

  ‘Right. Appreciate it, Reg. I’ll talk to them downstairs. Save you a call.’

  Paget caught Alcott before he left for New Street, and gave him the news. ‘Thank God for that,’ was Alcott’s only comment, but his step was lighter as he headed for the door.

  Paget had just returned to his desk when the telephone rang. It was an operator asking if he would accept a reverse charge call from Constance Remington in London.

  ‘Put her on,’ he told the girl. ‘I’ll accept it.’

  Mrs Remington wasted no time in coming to the point. ‘I want to know if it’s true that Lisa’s dead,’ she said. ‘And, if she is, why wasn’t I told? I’ve had reporters outside my house since late last night.’

  ‘I wish I could answer that, Mrs Remington,’ Paget said. ‘But all I can tell you right now is that no one has seen her since March 12th. We still hope to find her alive, but…’

  ‘Then why are you digging up the garden at the cottage? There’s a picture of it in the Sun this morning.’

  ‘We have to explore every avenue…’ Paget began, but Constance cut him off.

  ‘That’s a pile of shit and you know it!’ she snapped. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? And that snivelling little sod killed her. I told Lisa he was no bloody good. Stifled her career. Smothered her. She had five good years left if she hadn’t gone off with him and buried herself in the country. Undermined everything I’ve ever done for her. Has he confessed yet?’