by Peter Laws
‘Understood.’
She smiled and shooed him away. ‘Go on then. Have fun.’
He smirked. ‘And you.’
‘Shhhhhh!’ Another voice, from behind this time.
Wren held up her hand in apology.
Amelia looked over at him, frowning. He mouthed sorry then headed off.
By the time he reached the end of the row the Bible reading had come to an end. Chris must have been about to start his sermon but seemed to deliberately wait before speaking. So for about ten seconds the only thing that echoed in the church was the sound of Matt’s footsteps as he hurried up the aisle. A tiny piece of gravel was stuck in the grips (or was it a little neck bone from the fox?) Whatever it was, an echoing clatter came from his heel so that every eye was fixed on him as he made his way through the glass doors.
Some frowned, some whispered, some curled their lips. But every eye said the same thing.
Why would anyone in their right mind look so relieved to be leaving a church as wonderful as this?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
‘Not long now, Professor,’ the special constable said, as they clambered through bushes and over hills. She looked about fifty years old and regularly puffed air in and out of her cheeks. Mostly as she used her hands to lift her own hefty legs over logs. Her dyed black hair was thick with toilet roll-sized curls. They bounced as she walked. She was taking him across the sloping fields from Tabitha Clarke’s farmhouse down towards the edge of a thick forest.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Marion Fellowes.’
‘Matt Hunter. There’s no need to call me professor.’
They shook hands as they walked.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I already know your name because I saw you on telly, didn’t I?’
‘Uh-oh.’
‘No, no, it was good. I was impressed, you saving a possessed lady like that.’
‘Nah … she wasn’t possessed.’
‘No?’
‘It was psychological.’
‘Aww, are you sure?’
‘Hundred per cent.’
‘Well isn’t that a crying bloody shame,’ she said. ‘Where’s all the mystery going these days?’
He could already see the other officers in amongst the trees. Their jackets hung on branches and they’d rolled up their shirtsleeves in the heat. Most of them were kneeling down and sifting through things on the floor, kneecaps crushing twigs and bugs.
Miller was in the middle of it all in full uniform. He had that tight-lipped, strutting thing going on. The move that stressed people do. Matt sympathised. The guy was used to a fairly sedate life here in Hobbs Hill. The more they uncovered about these missing person cases (or ‘mis-pers’ as Miller called them) the more challenging it was becoming.
For some officers who ran stations in small villages, the sudden appearance of a crime on the scale of murder was an opportunity to put their police work into practice. A time to test their training and, dare he say it, get some excitement.
For others, though, it was the mark of failure. That somehow good old village bobby Terry Miller had let two women vanish while he was supposed to be watching over them. Like when a shepherd finds one of his sheep dead and covered in wolf bites.
‘There you go,’ Marion said, struggling to catch her breath. ‘Nice chatting.’
He thanked her with a nod.
Miller lifted his hand to greet Matt. ‘You get any more weird emails?’
‘Nope.’
‘Well that’s a relief. Good time at church?’
‘If by nice you mean bizarre and uncomfortable, then yeah. It was extremely nice.’
‘Well. I reckon this’ll be more your style.’
A pile of canvas frames, charred and burnt, lay in a messy black pyramid in the centre of a small clearing. The floor was scorched with white ash and black soot. It filled his nostrils with the smell of old smoke. Like that hideous Lapsang Souchong tea Wren insisted on drinking.
‘How many paintings are there?’
‘We’re laying out the debris and rebuilding the frames. We’ve got about fourteen so far.’
Matt ducked under a hanging branch to get closer. ‘I don’t get it. Why burn them them? Did any of them survive the fire?’
‘Three.’ Miller nodded towards a huge spray of nettles. Three canvases were leaning against three separate trees, all in a neat row. Fire had eaten into a third of one of them and half of the other two were charred.
Matt wandered closer and heard his knees pop as he crouched in front of each.
Because of the fire damage large areas of detail were missing, but there was enough to get the idea. All three pictures were variations on the same theme – a large naked woman sitting by, on or near trees. The curves and marks on the canvas were clearly made by someone who knew what they were doing. Tabitha Clarke actually had talent.
Which made the rest of it so odd.
Each of the three paintings had a thick crucifix daubed across it. In bright and vivid red paint, peeling only where the fire had tried to eat it away.
‘I told you we had a lot of crosses around here,’ Miller said, nervously.
‘They look splashed on, done quickly. I take it she didn’t normally have these slapped on her work?’
‘Er, no, she didn’t,’ Miller said. ‘I suppose she could have turned against her own pictures. Defaced and burnt them down here.’
‘Or someone else did this. Did you find anything else?’
A voice called over from a distance. ‘Sergeant Miller?’ All heads spun in the direction of a tall woman in a black jacket, crouching between two trees about fifty feet away.
Miller leant in, ‘That’s Benson. Brought her in from up the road.’
Up the road, Matt was learning, was local speak for the City of Oxford.
‘I think you’d better see this,’ she said, and held up the edge of a clear plastic bag between the tips of her blue rubber gloves. Inside it, nestled in the corner, was a mobile phone. Switched off. ‘I just found this under a bush. It wasn’t hidden that well.’
Miller squinted at the bag and curled his lip. ‘You put it in a Tesco’s sandwich bag? I thought you guys had proper evidence bags for—’
‘Calm …’ she pressed the air between them. ‘This is how I found it.’
‘Oh.’
She smirked at that. ‘It was sealed pretty tight. Whoever left it wanted to keep it protected from the rain and dew. Maybe they planned on picking it up later.’
‘Or they wanted someone else to find it,’ Matt said.
‘Quite possibly. Give me a second to clear it.’ Benson popped her black briefcase open as she set it onto a flat-looking tree stump. She pulled out brushes and tweezers then she popped up a little mini box thing made of blue plastic, big enough to put her hands in. She shimmied out a rugged-looking laptop and got to work examining the bag and phone.
Matt spotted a twisted log nearby. ‘Can I sit on this?’
She nodded. ‘Be my guest.’
He was just about to sit when he felt a buzz in his pocket. He pulled out his phone.
A text message from Wren:
They’re singing ‘It’s a Wonderful World’. I kid you not, everyone’s singing in a Louis Armstrong voice while two pensioners do an interpretive dance. Just thought you should know what you’re missing xxw
He sent her a quick response.
Get up on stage and do some body-popping. God commands it xxm
He slipped the phone back in his pocket and watched Benson. Taking photographs of the phone and swishing her brushes as it lay in the bottom of the blue pop-up box. She did this with such delicate precision, it was like she was cleaning up the precious, hidden bones of a T-Rex. He glanced back at the crosses on the canvases and around the woods, as officers lifted bushes and kicked dirt around. Maybe there were houses or farms nearby and they’d seen the smoke from the fire. He’d ask.
‘Done.’ Benson handed the phone bac
k to Harris, then she packed her dusters and tweezers away. She spun her laptop around so they could see.
‘Anything on the phone?’ Miller asked. ‘Or the bag?’
‘A couple of fibres. I’ll have to check them out at the office. Other than that, there’s nothing, except the prints. I ran them through the optical reader and checked against the prints from Clarke’s farmhouse.’
‘And?’
‘She definitely touched this phone, a lot, so I assume it’s hers. Found her prints, mainly on the side and back. Not so much on the buttons. But I couldn’t find any other prints. Feel free to switch it on, by the way.’
Everyone’s eyes flitted down to the mobile.
Miller hit the ‘on’ button. They waited for what seemed like a minute but was probably closer to twenty seconds. Then a sudden Samsung chime echoed through the wood. A bird must have thought it was the four-minute warning because it squeaked in panic and fluttered off in the opposite direction.
Miller started working his way through the phone menus. Impatient, Matt stepped behind to peer over his shoulder.
Texts received: 0
Texts sent: 0
Calls received: 0
Calls sent: 0
‘Check her address book,’ Matt said. ‘Maybe there’s a friend in there you don’t know about.’
Miller clicked a few buttons then shook his head.
Phone numbers: 0
‘Someone’s blanked this,’ Miller said. ‘There’s sod all on here.’
Matt was itching to grab the phone himself and rummage through the files. ‘Give it some time. It takes a bit for phones to pick up messages from the network. Have you tried her notes or diary?’
Miller flicked to the call log screen and, like everywhere else, it was empty. But as he moved back, he spotted something else. ‘Haaaang on a sec.’
Personal notes: 1
Miller clicked it open and read it to himself, first. He started to frown, then his face seemed to plunge. ‘Oh shit.’
‘What is it?’ Matt said.
‘Quote,’ Miller cleared his throat, ‘I’ve repented and I’m with God now. Maybe one day you could come too xx Tabitha Tansy Clarke.’ Miller narrowed his eyes and read the final word. ‘Verecundus.’
‘How odd,’ Matt leant in, intrigued, all but snatching the phone and looking at it himself. ‘That sounds like Latin.’
‘Is that what it is?’ Miller’s voice was almost a whisper. There was something weird about the way he was staring at the floor.
‘Miller? What’s going on?’
He looked up. ‘Do you speak Latin?’
‘A bit. I can’t remember what that word means, offhand but … it sounds familiar.’
‘Well, it sounds very familiar to me.’
Matt lowered his voice a little. ‘You’ve seen this before?’
Miller didn’t answer at first. He seemed to be turning thoughts over in his head. Finally he looked back at Taylor and Benson, standing there and listening. ‘Oh, what the hell. Maybe you can help with it. Nicola Knox’s mum found her daughter’s phone. She assumed it was a suicide note. It had a very similar message to this one.’ Miller rubbed his temple for a second, leaving a little white scratch. ‘That verecundus thing was on it, too.’
‘So that’s two missing women with the same message on their phone …’ Matt waited for a second. ‘This doesn’t sound good …’
Miller stared at the phone screen, tugging at his lip.
Police Constable Taylor, who hadn’t said a word so far suddenly piped up. ‘Suicide theory still stands.’
‘What?’ Miller said. ‘For both of them?’
‘Yeah. Why not? Maybe these two ladies got to know each other. Maybe they were even …’ he could hardly even bring himself to say it. ‘… you know … lovers. Like a suicide pact or something. Haven’t you seen Thelma and Louise?’
Matt skipped the detail that Thelma and Louis were actually Brad Pitt-level straight, and got to the point. ‘Putting Nicola and Tabitha in a relationship would make for a forty year age gap. That seems speculative at best and—’
Taylor shrugged, ‘I’ve read these older gays can be pretty darn predatory.’
Matt gasped and threw up his hands, ‘You can’t say that.’ He looked around at the others. ‘He can’t just say stuff like that. Not without any evidence.’
‘Watch your phrasing, Taylor,’ Miller said, quietly.
‘Look …’ Taylor went on. ‘Tabitha was dying, right? And maybe it got too much and so she euthanized herself … but she burned all this sinful stuff down here before she met her maker. I would have done the same thing if I was like her. I’d have repented.’
Miller blinked slowly, not saying a word.
‘So you have two ladies, at least one of which is suicidal, possibly both. And they have the exact same note? Obviously they must have been talking to each other.’
‘Or,’ Matt said, ‘someone killed them both and wrote these texts to confuse us. Doing it on the phone means the killer didn’t have to fake her handwriting.’
‘Or,’ Taylor held up a finger, alive now, ‘Tabitha wound up killing Nicola and she wrote these texts as a deco—’
‘Enough,’ Miller shouted, and a squirrel froze halfway up a tree. He took a long breath. ‘We don’t even have a single body yet. You can’t have a killer without a—’
‘Mrs Benson?’ Matt asked.
She looked up from the paintings, seemingly transfixed by them.
‘Shouldn’t a phone have strong prints on the number keys?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The phone. You said Tabitha’s prints are on the sides and back, but not much on the keys.’ He nodded down at the phone in Miller’s hand. ‘Isn’t that odd?’
She shrugged. ‘Potentially. But then she’d have used the same keys over and over. She could have rubbed away some of her own prints.’ A slight breeze rattled the leaves above them. ‘Unless … and I take it this is what you’re getting at … someone wearing gloves typed this message and smudged hers away.’
Matt took a step and a twig snapped loudly under his shoe. ‘Look, maybe Tabitha Clarke’s just run off, that’s entirely possible. Maybe even with Nicola Knox. But how far is a cancer victim going to get without seeing a doctor and getting her pills? You think she could clamber down here, burn her own stuff and still be able to stand up? I mean, me and Marion were out of breath just getting down the hill.’
Marion was obviously listening in, because she raised her hand. ‘He’s right. I nearly split a gizzard.’
Miller listened, quietly.
‘So unless one of them suddenly sends you a postcard saying they’re all happy and out on a field trip then clearly murder is a very real possibility here.’
‘That makes a lot of sense, Terry,’ said Marion. ‘A hell of a lot.’
‘I think you’re wrong,’ Taylor screwed up his face, like he’d just eaten a burnt cornflake. ‘I think the first thing we do is check the lake properly. Get some divers in. You may not be aware, Professor, but Cooper’s Force is quite the hot spot for jumpers. It’s like that forest in Japan. People from up the road come down here all the time and do themselves in. We get a lot of stressed academics flinging themselves off too …’ He tilted his head when he said that, to make some sort of point. ‘Besides … you’re from London. So you need to understand that we just don’t tend to get things like murder out—’
Miller suddenly yelped like a little dog, cutting Taylor off. His body jerked spasmodically and everyone saw the phone drop straight through his fingers to the ground, chiming as it fell.
‘Terry?’ Matt said.
‘Bloody little thing. It just moved in my hand.’
‘Just like “The Monkey’s Paw”,’ Marion said ominously. ‘You ever read—’
‘Christ, Marion, will you just zip it?’ Miller bent over, plucked the phone out of the dry leaves and turned the screen towards him. It was finally gathering a signal and was starting to colle
ct voicemails and texts.
Two more chimes came through, one quickly after the other.
One text and three voicemail messages. Nothing more.
Miller pulled the phone close to his face, so that the others couldn’t see. ‘Okay … the text message is … some competition offer. Irrelevant.’ He held the phone to his head and listened to the voice messages. Matt could hear the odd electronic warble coming from the phone, but not enough to work out what the voices were saying.
‘Can’t you put it on speaker phone?’ Matt said.
Miller pushed out his lips. ‘Shush.’ Then his eyes suddenly widened. ‘I don’t believe this …’ Finally, he pressed a button then pulled the phone from his ear. ‘Right. The last two messages are from her doctor, asking why she didn’t turn up for her appointment.’
‘And the first?’
With a sort of twisted, satisfied smile, Miller held the phone up and replayed the message on speaker phone. A tinny, computerised voice gave the details: ‘Message. Sent. Tuesday. July. 12th. 12:24. AM.’
‘Just after midnight, which is a weird time to call anybody,’ Miller said. ‘Which was also a week or so before Tabitha was noticed missing.’
The message began. Matt could feel his heart pounding harder with each beat of the sentences.
Hi, Tabby. Got your message on our machine. Thanks for getting in touch. I’m happy to come and see you on Sunday night. About eight o’clock, alright? Oh and Tabby, I’m only going to come if you’re serious about this. Okay? God bless you … and bye.
Miller tilted his head. ‘Didn’t you tell me that Chris Kelly said he’d never met Tabitha Clarke?’
Matt was surprised to find himself pushing his tongue against the inside of his cheek, as if some schoolboy loyalty was preventing him from dobbing in a friend, however loose that label hung. He quickly ignored it and started to nod. ‘He said he’d never had the pleasure. Those exact words.’
‘Which means Pastor Chris is a bloody, barefaced liar.’ Miller checked his watch. ‘Come on. I suddenly feel like going to church.’