by Clare Curzon
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Also by Clare Curzon
About the Author
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Towards three o’clock the wind that had tugged all night at the shutters became possessed of a demon. Connie Barton poked her husband in mid-snore and continued prodding until he growled in protest.
‘Somethun’s blown loose,’ she muttered. ‘Best see to’t afore it gets torn off.’
Ned groaned but dutifully swung his feet to the floor. ‘’Taint none of our shutters,’ he claimed, cocking his head to listen. Through the customary creaks and moans of the old farmhouse this dull thudding made an alien sound. ‘It’ll be Hoad’s stable door. Nowt to do wi’us.’
All the same he knew he’d be allowed no rest until the thing was fixed. He lumbered downstairs, shrugged on his market-day overcoat and sat down to pull on his boots.
The stable stood midway between the two dwellings, both Hoad’s properties – although the older farmhouse came with Ned’s job as livestock manager. He would have ignored this overnight demand, except that dry fodder stored in the stable touched on his cattle interest. But by Sod’s Law he knew that the minute he’d fixed the slamming door and regained his bed’s warmth there’d be a call to attend Red Rose’s calving. Best take a look in the byre while he was at it, and check the baby alarm set up there so’s he’d be sure to have notice of the beast’s increased restlessness. Not that he’d likely hear her movements above the noise of the storm.
Stepping out into the gale activated the yard lights’ sensor. They made a difference, these modern-day devices. What usually let you down now was human error, labourers not being the steady folk of his younger days. Some lazy bugger couldn’t latch a door right on this occasion. And the Hoads were playing at gentry with their ears buried deep in their duvets, passing on the effort to some other poor sod. ‘Meaning me,’ he grumbled as he stumbled out, and the wind gusted the words back in his throat.
His thinning hair was whipped into a grey quiff. It was a wind to lean on. Overhead black tatters of cloud streaked over the moon’s gibbous face, strobing cold light across the rooftops like a kids’ disco. He’d been right about the stable. Not a single farmyard noise wasn’t intimately distinguishable after the thirty-eight years of his working here.
The timber door, swollen with rain, became heavy and there were times it took a good shove to drive it home. But for five days until this night’s cloudburst the weather had been dry with the wind rising to gale force. In the downpour someone just hadn’t bothered with the bolts. With the battering the place was taking, he’d need to drop the bar across besides.
He looked around for it, decided it must be inside, propped against the wall. Only it wasn’t. He reached for the light switch, found it already at ON, but the stable in darkness. More bad maintenance. Nobody bothered since the horses had gone. He tried the switch several times before blundering across to feel for the nearest hanging bulb. His hand met jagged edges of glass. He swore as his fingers came away sticky with blood.
There was a storm lantern on the work bench. At least nobody had removed the matches for their fags. Ned lit the lantern, raised the wick and turned to look for the heavy timber bar. That was when he saw the straw bales dragged into the shape of a crescent and the woman stretched out on it like a heathen sacrifice. Naked but for a coarse dark net spread over her chest.
She had to be unconscious. Any sleepwalker would be wakened by that repeated thudding of the door. He felt a dull beat of shock but, his mind still full of concern for the heifer, he acted from habit, struggling to free himself of his overcoat. Unwilling to disturb her but fearful for hypothermia, he went across to cover her.
It wasn’t a coarse net stretched over her upper body. The glistening, dark tracks were drying blood. The face – he had to look away – was mottled and distorted, the tongue protruding. He lifted his head, gulping suddenly for air at the sickly smell of the abattoir.
Connie, who had rapidly exchanged her nightdress for a tweed skirt and sweater, filled a large kettle for unlimited cups of tea. Routinely fixed to the familiar, she could barely take in what her husband had gabbled as he rushed in to dial from the kitchen. She noticed blankly that in shock he’d forgotten the new mobile phone in his coat pocket. For that matter, he’d lost his coat too.
‘I’ll have to wait there till the police come,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried the Manor number but there’s no reply. You’d best have another go. Hang on till they decide to answer.’
Connie stood petrified with the instrument in her hand. ‘Someone dead? But who?’ she asked in bewilderment. ‘What’ll I tell Mr Hoad? He’ll want to know who’s out there in his stable.’
It took thirteen minutes from phoning for the first police to turn up. They were uniformed constables in a motorway patrol car. On arriving, one stayed in the warmth of the driving seat, chewing. The other, burly and stolid, was sceptical. ‘You say there’s no proper light, sir. Maybe what you saw was a bundle of rags. Or some kids been making a guy for their bonfire on the fifth. You stay out here with my colleague, while I take a look with my torch.’
He took just seconds to confirm what Ned had claimed and return sickly outside. He moved away to use his car radio, but his voice was blown back to Ned. ‘Body of a woman, Sergeant. Violent, yes. Starkers. You want Hoad’s Manor Farm, Fordham. Take the A413 to Bramall’s roundabout then left and left again. There’s a sign by the entrance. Got a picture of a cow on it.’
He listened for instructions, grunted acknowledgement and returned with the driver. ‘I’m to stay and guard the site. You’d both better get inside out of this gale.’
There was no more rest to be had that night with all the comings and goings. A white Land Rover and two unmarked cars brought more police, followed by the van with all their scientific paraphernalia and white-overalled Scenes of Crime Officers.
Connie had eventually abandoned the phone. ‘Their line’s gone dead,’ she explained. ‘It’ll be the wind, see.’ But when Ned offered to walk over to the Hoads’ house and let them know, he was prevented.
‘Sound sleepers are they?’ a plain-clothes sergeant enquired dryly. He had a point. Even if the gale and the banging stable door hadn’t roused them, the alien invasion of flashing blue lights must have done.
‘Maybe they’re away?’ The man’s round, blue eyes seemed to be probing him. He had a flat, puppet’s face with a sharp, questing nose; made Ned think of that Pinocchio cartoon by Disney.
‘They’d have let me know,’ Ned assured the detective. ‘Would’ve left instructions, see?’
Shortly after that the centre of interest moved from stable to Manor house. That was when finally the idea reached the Bartons that the body wasn’t some travelling woman’s, but someone they knew well en
ough. After the final vans and most police cars had left, a burly middle-aged detective arrived and reluctantly broke the full news to them. His craggy face was sombre.
‘There’s been a tragedy up at the house,’ he said shortly. It seemed to have shaken even him.
‘A killing. Counting the one in the stable, there’s four of them altogether.’
By now some news of that kind was inescapable. Barton closed his eyes. ‘The Hoads.’
‘Four? Oh no! Not the kiddies too!’ Connie whispered.
He nodded. ‘So. It means that we’ll need your help to fill us in on the family. But get some rest for now and I’ll be back to talk to you about eleven.’ He looked at his watch. ‘That gives you just four hours. I must insist you don’t get in touch with anyone outside for the moment.’
‘Rest?’ Barton queried bitterly. ‘I’ve got my beasts to see to. Byre man’s overdue and milking should be starting. There’ll be no time for tattling.’ He plunged out of the house, a leather jacket protecting his head against sleeting rain that dropped like a steel shutter.
A crime of such enormity couldn’t stay long under wraps. By midday increased activity at the morgue entrance alerted hospital staff. Phones buzzed. The press started to gather, roistering for details.
Earlier, Superintendent Mike Yeadings had been roused from his bed by his sergeant’s call, and he informed him he’d attend in person. He drank his coffee scalding at the kitchen door, staring through darkness at the wrecked garden. Trees leant over the lawn littered with broken branches. The last brave October roses were stripped from the pergola and flower borders looked trampled in a stampede.
A demon night. And other demons had been let loose on human lives: the slaughter of an entire family as they slept. Or two slept, one vainly defended and one fled, half-naked, into the wild dark.
Major crime was his everyday concern, and violent death a part of it. But in Thames Valley, the UK’s largest provincial force, murder made up a moderate statistic. Twenty-eight cases, he reckoned, in a bad year. But now – four in a night, and two of them children. A bloody massacre: surely the work of a madman.
He nodded to his wife who stood silent, understanding, walked blindly past his own two children, collected coat, car keys, and left with his head down, too conscious of little Sally in her nightdress staring out at the chaos of their garden, her blunt, puppyish Down’s Syndrome face gone square with the effort not to cry. He wanted to stay on, help her stake up the battered dahlias, show her that disasters could be lived through, overcome. Up to a point.
What he found at Hoad’s Manor Farm denied this. And it had been left to him to break the full horror to the Barton couple, standing stricken in their cottage, trying to believe that normal life could go on from where it was yesterday.
He looked at his watch, nodded to them, arranged to return after eleven.
The team was to meet at 8.50 a.m. Grim-faced, Yeadings went out again, into a drenched morning still streaked with the crimson of a bloody dawn.
Chapter Two
A provisional murder team had been assembled from the Major Crimes Unit and CID of the local Area, where an Incident Room was already being furnished with a full complement of computers and office equipment. A whiteboard covered one long wall, to which an Ordnance Survey map, together with local press photographs of Fordham Manor Farm and the Hoad parents, had been affixed with Blu-tack. The assembled officers perched on desks and shared chairs or leaned against the farther wall, waiting to be tasked.
The dead had been named as Frederick Arthur and Jennifer Suzanne Hoad; their children simply as Daniel and Angela. The anomaly came to light as soon as the inquiry opened, because both murdered children were girls.
They had been killed sleeping side by side in twin beds; one dark-haired, the other blonde. Both were aged ten or eleven. Two sets of almost identical school uniform, scarlet and grey, were found hanging in the nearby wardrobe, and the clothes laid out for Saturday morning were equally uniform, being designer-label jeans, trainers, T-shirts and black fleeces.
Daniel, the son, was thought to be almost sixteen, tall, fair, willowy and said to look several years older. This description had been gathered from the Bartons. The boy was clearly missing from the house. Some weekends he was known to go camping.
The more solid little girl with thick blonde plaits had yet to be accounted for. Somewhere there were parents who still believed their young daughter was happily sleeping over for the weekend with her school-friend. They had to be found before news broke of the carnage at the Manor house.
Yeadings had phoned through to the SOCO team himself ordering an urgent search of the child’s belongings. He nodded for DS Beaumont to continue his assessment of the murder scene.
‘The boy’s absence,’ Beaumont said, visibly uneasy. ‘Does that make him a suspect? He could have had access to the gun cabinet.’
‘We keep open minds,’ Yeadings told him. ‘In any case he qualifies for Victim Support. We badly need to find him. Now let’s get on to the time and circumstances of the crime.’
‘Well before 3 a.m.’ Beaumont said. ‘That’s when the thudding of the stable door got on Mrs Barton’s nerves. It woke her some minutes before her attempt to rouse her husband. Apparently he sleeps more soundly and snores down opposition. When he did reach the first body, that of Mrs Hoad in the stable, blood from her stab wounds had had time to start congealing. Any wet smears found since then would have come from Barton’s own hand, cut when he reached to the broken light bulb.
‘Prof Littlejohn’s up in Newcastle at a conference, but this case is spectacular enough to bring him back. He’s flying into Heathrow tonight; post-mortem provisionally set for 4.30 p.m. tomorrow, Sunday. Until he gives us a lead we have no earliest time slot for the killings.’
‘It has to be before the gale became so destructive,’ Yeadings agreed. ‘Otherwise the storm would have woken the children. There were broken roof tiles on the terrace under their window.’
‘Some kids could sleep through Armageddon,’ Beaumont countered. ‘The parents’ double bed was disturbed, with both pillows creased, so they’d retired for the night and then got up for some reason. Perhaps on account of the rising storm, or because there was an unexpected visitor.’
‘There were no signs of a break-in,’ DC Silver considered, ‘so, unless Hoad let him in, maybe their killer was in the house as a guest, and he stayed up waiting for an opportunity to strike.’
‘If so, he was cool-headed enough to remove his belongings before leaving. And no extra bed had been used,’ Yeadings said. ‘Whoever frantically chased Jennifer Hoad across the farmyard would hardly go back to clear his stuff away.’
‘He spared time enough to rig a touch of theatre in the stable,’ Beaumont reminded him. ‘The straw bales had been dragged into a semicircle in the tack room and the woman displayed on top. That wasn’t how Barton said he’d seen the place earlier.’
‘Do we know yet if she was raped?’ DS Rosemary Zyczynski asked in a low voice.
Yeadings hesitated. ‘Dr Marlowe has reserved judgment on that. We’ll have to wait for what the Prof finds tomorrow.’
There was an interruption as copies of the first crime scene photographs arrived and were handed around. A further set was pinned to the whiteboard alongside the family’s particulars. The detailed horror made a shocked silence fall over the whole room.
‘Something we still badly need is a likeness of the missing son,’ Yeadings complained. ‘Z, I want you to go back and join the SOCO team. See what you can turn up on that. Don’t hurry back.’
For a moment she suspected he was blocking her out of some present action. Not that visiting the crime scene would pander to any imagined feminine frailty. No, she quickly decided, he simply meant her to catch up on the scene which the others had already observed.
Yeadings eyed her evenly. ‘If you do find what we need in time, rejoin us for the next briefing.’
He looked round at the others. ‘Right. W
ell, unless anyone wants to add anything, you’d better go your designated ways. After I’ve seen the Bartons again, mine is to interview the press. It seems the PR office is suffering a fit of the vapours. Regional Crimes will meet up with this augmented murder team at 3 p.m. when the Incident Room’s fully prepared. Everyone reports then to Sergeant Wally Pierce as Office Manager.’
The meeting broke up. Yeadings was aware of Beaumont hovering, sleekly alerted and wearing his star-pupil expression. But he wasn’t going to be awarded any gold stars for the moment. He clearly imagined that Z had been sidelined for him to receive an accolade discreetly.
Shuffling his papers, Yeadings waited for his tactful cough of reminder. When it came he looked up as if suddenly recalling the present. ‘Oh, yes. The AC Personnel has confirmed DI Salmon’s to stay on indefinitely. When he gets back from leave he’ll be running the case as temporary DCI under me as Senior Investigating Officer.’
With that the DS would have to be satisfied. ‘Ah, Beaumont,’ said Yeadings, as if throwing a disgruntled dog a bone, ‘I’ll take you along, to talk to the Bartons.’
Rain was still sheeting down as they found Connie Barton scrubbing carrots in the kitchen sink. She hadn’t forgotten their intended visit. In the dining room freshly baked scones topped with cream and raspberry jam, plus a tea-set of exuberantly floral bone china, were set out on a stiffly starched tablecloth. It struck Yeadings as almost indecent to make such an occasion of it. And yet he understood the woman’s need for some sense of decent normality.
‘I’ll jest call my husband,’ she offered, went out into the still boisterous wind and applied herself energetically to the brass ship’s-bell that hung in the porch. ‘He’s heard it,’ she shouted as a distant double blast on a whistle replied.
‘You probably reckernised it’s a police one,’ she said proudly. ‘My Uncle Charlie was a copper up in Nottingham and he left it to me. Better than running up an almighty bill with them mobile phones.’