by Granger, Ann
Again he waited to see if Carter would react. Carter only nodded.
‘Go on, Mr Ferris.’
‘Well, I panicked at first, of course I did. Then I thought that if I could dump her body somewhere where it wouldn’t be found for a while, there was no one who’d connect her with me. Perhaps I could bury her? I thought about all that unused land at Cricket. There were a few sheep in a couple of fields. Eli wandered round the property sometimes and Penny rode across it, but no one inspected every corner. But next I had an even better idea, a real brainwave, or so I believed. I could get rid of Eva’s body and get Lucas Burton out of my life at one and the same time.
‘Lucas wouldn’t want the police around his place, asking him questions, digging up his past. He’d built himself a nice brand-new shiny life, no past history, nothing he’d want his new friends to know about.
‘But people like Lucas are too damn clever for their own good. My old grandma used to say, “Be too sharp and you’ll cut yourself!” Old Marvin, lurking there inside new Lucas, he was different. He couldn’t resist a scam or the hint of one.
‘I called him to say I had a business proposition. I wanted to discuss it with him but not at my house. Nor did I want to meet him anywhere public. I knew the ideal spot, I told him, and described Cricket Farm. I said I’d meet him there at three thirty the next day. I knew he wouldn’t able to resist it. I took Eva’s body up there in the Citroën late that evening, nobody about but me and the bats flying round that Dracula’s residence. I arranged it, the body, just inside the cowshed. I knew that when Lucas arrived, he’d take a look round, recce the lie of the land. He’d want to make sure no one else was hanging about up there. He’d stick his nose into the barn for sure, and he’d find Eva.
‘Of course, there was a chance Eli might decide to go there during the following morning and he’d find Eva before Lucas did. If he did, well, too bad. My plan for getting rid of Lucas wouldn’t have worked but I’d still have disposed of Eva. There’s a history of murder at Cricket. Eli might not necessarily have gone straight to the cops. He might just take her out somewhere on his land and bury her himself. Eli was like Lucas in that he wouldn’t want the police around, either. The old boy minds his own business and dislikes strangers. I wanted Lucas to find Eva first, because I knew he’d be in a blind sweat about it. He’d get out of there as fast as he could and the next thing he’d do would be to cut himself loose from me, because I’d suggested it as a meeting place. I could put him at the scene. You cops might think him a suspect.’
Ferris chuckled. ‘And, do you know? It worked like a dream. He rang up minutes after he’d found Eva’s body to tell me to abort the meeting. He was scared witless. Then he rang again in the evening to tell me our association was at an end. I put up a show of arguing; I don’t know if it fooled him. It didn’t matter. He was terrified and no way would he go to the police. You check out people who take you that kind of information, don’t you? In case it’s the killer, trying to be clever?’ Ferris stared interrogatively at Carter.
Carter nodded and then said aloud, for the tape recorder’s benefit, ‘Yes.’
Ferris nodded. ‘Well, then, you’d check out Lucas. You might find out about his change of name. For all I knew, he might even have some kind of criminal record. Anyway, there was a good chance you’d get curious about him. Murderers behave in weird ways, or so I’ve read. They return to the scene of the crime and you might think that was what old Lucas had done. No, he didn’t want you checking him out.’ Ferris gave a satisfied nod. ‘Perfect . . . except that Penny, by a bit of bad luck, saw Lucas in his car, parked up near the farm, and she thought it looked suspicious. So I undertook to phone Eli and he jumped in that truck of his and rattled off to investigate. And, what do you know? He did call you. Surprising, really. But, so what? By then it didn’t matter. I was clear and Lucas was in the frame.’
‘What made you decide to contact him again the next morning?’ Carter asked. ‘Why did you go to see him at his garage?’
‘I didn’t,’ Ferris said serenely. ‘Why should I? I told you, I’d already got exactly what I wanted, Lucas running scared. I had nothing to do with his death. I didn’t need him dead, just out of my life. Plenty of other people must have hated his guts. Who knows what funny business he was involved in? He must have had more enemies than he could count.’
Ferris leaned forward, the look in his eyes frankly mocking. ‘You may have DNA evidence putting Eva in that car. You haven’t got anything putting me in that garage and you won’t get it.’
He sat back. ‘I didn’t kill him. Like it or lump it, believe it or not. If you do believe it, prove it.’
Foscott cleared his throat warningly.
‘We’ll do our best,’ said Carter. ‘We recovered a partial palm print from the Mercedes in the garage. The car had recently been cleaned and polished so that suggests the print was made immediately after that process had been completed. It didn’t come from Burton, so it must have come from someone else who was there, a visitor. We’ve checked it against your prints, and we believe you were that visitor, Mr Ferris.’
Ferris sat up straight and for a second or two seemed nonplussed. Then he opened his mouth but, before he could speak, Foscott leaned towards his client and frowned.
Aloud Foscott addressed Carter. ‘We were not informed of this before, and at this point in time my client has nothing to say about it.’
Carter took the rebuff calmly and moved on. ‘Meanwhile there are other charges made against you: that you physically assaulted Inspector Jessica Campbell, causing her actual bodily harm, and that you kidnapped her and imprisoned her against her will at Cricket Farm. Also, that you imprisoned Penelope Gower and in an act of arson fired the stable block with intent to endanger Ms Gower’s life.’
Ferris scowled at him. ‘Bloody women,’ he said, ‘they’re all the same. You can’t trust them, any of them. Women got me into this mess. It was Karen wanting us to buy a property out of our financial bracket that made me listen to Crapper, all those years ago, and get entangled in his dodgy schemes. Then Karen dumped me. She did it slowly, by degrees, but I knew what she was up to. Penny dumped me. I sweated all hours down at those stables, shovelling muck, building fences, fixing anything that needed a hammer and nails. I did it for love and she knew it. But oh no, she wouldn’t marry me! I was just the mug who worked for free. She used me in the same way she used old Eli. She told me she wanted to spend the rest of her life with those nags, so I thought, right! I’ll arrange that for you, fix it like I fixed loose slates and broken fences after your kid—’
Ferris broke off to twist on his chair and glare at a startled Reggie Foscott. ‘Your kid smashed through them for the umpteenth time! Penny could die amongst the horses, just like she wanted. As for your Inspector Campbell, she was snooping round. I’d already answered her questions. What the hell did she want to come back to the house for? Why did she have to go poking around in my garage? Just like Crapper – or Burton, as the stupid sod liked to call himself! Why did he have to seek me out? Why walk back into my life? Do you know?’ He jabbed a forefinger at Carter whose watchful expression hadn’t changed in the face of Ferris’s tirade delivered inches away at the top of his voice.
Phil Morton, however, had left his seat by the door and moved closer, standing by the wall just behind Ferris. The accused man was aware of him and cast him a dismissive glance over his shoulder before turning back to Carter.
‘Two women I loved, Karen and later Penny, wanted to walk out of my life. Yet I couldn’t get rid of two other people, neither Eva when I tried to terminate a silly little fling, nor Burton, someone I wanted to stay out of my life for ever! There’s no such thing as natural justice, do you know that? Life plays a series of dirty tricks. That’s all it is, just one big sick joke.’
He fell silent abruptly, only the echo of his shouts hanging in the air of the suddenly quiet room. The anger slowly faded from his expression. There was a protesting creak from the frame of
his chair as he leaned back and the backrest took his weight. He was sweating, pearls of moisture beaded his forehead, but otherwise something of his former detached manner had returned. It was as if a window that had been opened into his mind had suddenly been shut. Ferris was gazing at Carter as if the superintendent had been some kind of mildly interesting object in the scenery.
‘None of it was my fault,’ he said with the air of one who had solved a problem. ‘If all of them had been reasonable, none of it would have happened.’ He half stretched out a hand towards the superintendent, palm turned uppermost. ‘Don’t you see?’
Chapter 18
‘He’s a nutcase, in my opinion,’ said Phil Morton later, to Jess. ‘Whether or not a shrink would think so.’ He sat in her office and for the past twenty minutes they had been rehashing the whole investigation.
‘He’s not mad enough to get off, as far as the law is concerned. He’s a vicious killer and perfectly aware of what he’s doing. Let’s hope a jury decides that,’ returned Jess firmly. ‘And that a judge puts him away for as long as is possible. He’s self-obsessed, is unable to take any responsibility for anything he does, and vindictive. Ferris is a very nasty piece of work.’
‘Ah, but he bashed you on the bonce; and his defence lawyer will say that’s coloured your view of him,’ said Morton wisely. ‘You know what these legal guys are like.’
‘My view of Ferris is that he’s a murderer! And what was his explanation for attacking me? I’d returned to his house; I was looking into his garage. He was forced into it. It was my fault. He’s the worst sort, sees himself as a victim.’
‘So do half the violent types in gaol now,’ said Morton. He adopted a whining voice in mimicry. ‘“I wouldn’t have stabbed the bloke if he hadn’t tried to stop me nicking his mobile phone . . .”’ He grimaced.
‘Exactly, a psychopath.’
‘That’s what I said, he’s a nutter. How are you feeling, by the way? Not that it isn’t a pleasure to see you back at your desk, ma’am.’ Morton gave a rare grin.
‘I feel fine, thanks. Now then, we need a watertight case against him. He’s clever and articulate and if we slip up, he’ll wriggle out of both those murder charges.’
‘Oh, he’s a regular smarty-boots,’ said Morton lugubriously.
Jess tilted her chair against the wall in the way she’d always been told not to do when she was small. She stared up at the ceiling where a loose strand of cobweb floated in the breeze from the half-opened window.
Loose strands, she thought. Is Ferris going to get off murdering Eva Zelená on a technicality because of something we’ve – I’ve – neglected?
She began to enumerate the points of the case in her head. Ferris admits she was in the car and they fought. He admits he put his hands round her neck and throttled her. The body fluids show he transported her in the boot of the Citroën and he doesn’t deny it. The only thing that puzzles me is how he packed her in there. A Saxo doesn’t have that much boot space. She was a small girl, though. What a pity the blood in the car turned out to be his. I suppose a defence lawyer will use that to point out that she really made a serious attack on his client, even if she was half his size. Ferris will stick to saying he was defending himself and it all got out of hand. We’ll have to trust the jury, won’t we? He wasn’t defending himself; she was defending herself. She drew blood when the poor kid got in a lucky punch on his nose.
Then there’s the order in which he says things happened. First, he says, he killed Eva unintentionally. Only after that he decided to involve Burton in finding the body because he wanted Burton out of his life. But what if he had wanted to get rid of Burton first and foremost and decided to kill Eva – someone else he wanted rid of – to do it?
She tipped her chair forward to its correct position. Aloud she said, ‘Anyway, he can’t deny he did hit me on the head and shut me up in that house of horrors; nor that he imprisoned Penny Gower in her tack room and tried to set fire to it.’
‘True,’ said Morton more cheerfully before reverting to his natural gloom. ‘But there’s less to tie him to the death of Lucas Burton. He is still denying it. I wish we had found the weapon. I’ve a bad feeling about that. The partial palm print suggests Ferris was in the garage. But unfortunately it’s incomplete. It’s not enough.’
He scratched the back of his neck and looked reflective. ‘You know, when Carter told him we’d found that print, Ferris looked pretty sick: surprised and worried. He’s a very careful chap but he overlooked the fact that he might have touched the car.’
‘His defence is that the print was made at some earlier time; when Burton was visiting him to discuss his accounts,’ Jess pointed out. ‘Ferris works from home, and generally goes outside to see his clients off. He must have touched Burton’s car on the last such occasion – so he says. He also says when Burton later cleaned his car, he must have missed that patch. Andrew Ferris has an answer for everything.’
Morton snorted. ‘Burton spent his time after the visit to Cricket Farm polishing the Mercedes to showroom perfection! It’d be a blooming miracle if he failed to wipe off an earlier palm print.’
‘We can still expect a battle royal in court over the palm print.’ Jess sighed. ‘No one actually saw him at the garage, that’s the problem, and he says he didn’t even know where it was. Burton probably did have enemies, lots of them. Smooth operator like that, must have trodden on a lot of toes along the way.’
Morton eyed her. ‘What does the superintendent reckon?’
‘He’s arguing Burton only had one enemy we know of hereabouts, Ferris. We know how much Ferris wanted to be free of him. Carter thinks, and so do I, that Ferris wasn’t satisfied he’d got Burton off his back for good, even after his elaborate scheme fixing to have Burton find the body. Burton had turned up in his life once already after being out of it for years, remember! Who was to say that after a while, when Burton had got over the fright of finding Eva, he wouldn’t turn up again? Carter and I both think Ferris wanted to make sure of him.’
‘Nice to know we’re all agreed here,’ said Morton enigmatically. ‘Let’s hope the Crown Prosecution Service is part of our merry party.’
The cobweb was still moving gracefully to and fro. Jess could stick it no longer. She stood up and collected the rusty black umbrella that lived in the corner of the room for emergency use in unexpected rainstorms. It had occupied this office far longer than she had. Forgotten years before by an unknown owner, it was so shabby that anyone who took it home invariably brought it back. Watched with interest by Morton, she reached up and managed to hook the cobweb with the ferrule and drag it down.
‘Got you!’ she said. She pointed the ferrule at Morton, who raised his eyebrows.
‘You know what would be nice, Phil? It would be nice to show Ferris was in Burton’s house after the time we know Burton died. I’d bet a month’s salary on Ferris going to the house; using keys he took off Burton’s dead body, and searching it, removing everything that might indicate a link between him and Burton in the past.’
‘My granny always told me,’ Morton said sanctimoniously, ‘never to bet money I couldn’t afford to lose. We can’t prove he was in the house. SOCO crawled all over it. Not a fingerprint. Not a DNA trace. Not one witness who saw him creeping in or out. No useful testimony from that weird woman who cleaned for him. She just said everything looked the same to her. Mind you, she must be the most unobservant woman in Gloucestershire.’ He shook his head wonderingly. ‘It still takes my breath away that she turned up three times a week to sit in Burton’s kitchen and make herself cups of tea.’
‘It’s Ferris’s modus operandi,’ Jess persisted obstinately. ‘He strips his victims of all personal items: phones, keys, credit cards and money, the lot. He took Eva’s mobile phone and purse, plus her lipstick and any other make-up items she had on her.’
‘Milada says,’ Morton informed her, ‘that Eva never went out without her mobile.’
‘What nineteen year old do
es? But we haven’t found anything in his possession, not a sausage. If we could locate just one item . . . What does he do with all these things? We’ve turned Ferris’s house inside out and there’s nothing there belonging either to Eva or to Burton. We persuaded Reggie Foscott to open the sealed package he left for safekeeping with him, and it contains personal papers, mostly relating to Lucas’s change of name. Nothing to do with Ferris.’
‘He’s got a stash somewhere,’ opined Morton. ‘He may have successfully disposed of the murder weapon, but he just didn’t have time to destroy everything or hide so much.’ He collected the umbrella Jess had left lying on her desk and tidily returned it to its corner home.
‘You know,’ he said diffidently, over his shoulder. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t. Doesn’t destroy things, I mean. Perhaps he’s a bit of a collector. He wants to keep personal items, like a lipstick or a mobile phone.’
‘Toby jugs!’ said Jess immediately. ‘He collects them. There’s a display cabinet full of the things in his house.’ She recalled all the boxes of personal items standing in Ferris’s drive and the heaped oddments lying around indoors, awaiting disposal. ‘His wife was a real hoarder. You saw the masses of stuff she kept there when you went out to the house.’
‘Oh, her,’ said Phil, ‘that’s another weird one. She’s a compulsive spender, if you ask me.’
‘I did think,’ Jess went on, ‘he might have concealed his victim’s possessions amongst Karen’s stuff. But, as you know, we turned out every one of those crates and boxes, and all we found were enough shoes to make Imelda Marcos envious and a junk shop full of holiday souvenirs.’
She broke off and snapped her fingers. ‘Storage units! Penny Gower told me Ferris said he might send his wife’s stuff to store once he’d packed it up. Get on to it, Phil. Storage units, bank deposit boxes, anything of that nature.’
‘Will do,’ promised Morton.
Bennison appeared. ‘Oh, there you are, ma’am, I’ve been looking for you. How are you feeling?’