by Fay Sampson
‘It could just be someone with enough money to pick himself a site for a one-off house out in the country,’ said Nick. ‘From what you say, it was outside the woods. Great views, I should imagine. One survey nail is hardly proof that he’s prospecting for minerals.’
‘You’re an architect. You would say that,’ Tom retorted.
‘I’m a sensible enough bloke to know that building a house is a far more likely explanation than what you’re suggesting. And just supposing for the sake of argument that you’re right, what would that have to do with Eileen Caseley’s murder?’
Tom let the nail fall on to the kitchen table with a sigh. It rolled in a half circle before it came to rest.
‘You’ve got me there. Mum tried to tell the police before that there might be something going on in the woods, but it doesn’t look as if they’ve followed it up. No police tape across the footpath, or round the old cottage. We could just come and go as we pleased. And, of course, she was telling them to look in the woods nearer the farm. We didn’t know then that the really interesting stuff was further on.’
‘And further away from the farmhouse where Eileen Caseley was shot.’
‘You think it was just domestic violence, don’t you, Dad?’ Millie spoke up from the door of the conservatory. ‘You think she was having it off with somebody and he took a gun to her.’
Nick paused before he spoke. Suzie saw how he was struggling to envisage this.
‘It’s hard to say. I only saw him for a few minutes, and Eileen Caseley for – what? – half an hour. I wouldn’t say either of them was behaving normally. We’ve no way of knowing whether they were upset because of something that had happened between them, or whether the fact that there was someone else on their land besides us had anything to do with it.’
‘He might have fired that shot to warn her,’ Millie said.
‘Whatever it is,’ Suzie put in, ‘this is evidence. The police can’t work out what happened unless they have the whole picture. We need to tell them.’
Nick threw up his hands. ‘I know when I’m beaten. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you to stay away from a crime scene and not go muddying the waters. But what’s done is done. You’ve trampled all over the area around the cottage, and now that surveying site you found. So, yes, you’d better go ahead and tell the police what you’ve done.’
‘And what we’ve found,’ Suzie argued. ‘And if I hadn’t been there, that woman on the bus wouldn’t have told me about someone wanting to open a mine in the area, and how the locals are up in arms against it. Philip might have stood to gain from it, but from what she said he was dead set against mining too.’
‘Do we march round to police headquarters waving this at them?’ Tom asked, brandishing the large nail again. ‘Or ring them up first?’
‘A phone call would be best,’ Suzie suggested. ‘Make sure we get to talk to the right person.’
She realized they were all looking at her. She coloured.
‘I don’t know why I let myself get dragged into this. I tried to tell Tom not to go. But then I thought, well, maybe there ought to be someone there with their head screwed on.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ Tom grinned, ‘for that ringing vote of confidence in your offspring.’
‘It’s because you’re my offspring,’ she said darkly. ‘I know you too well. All right then. I suppose it’ll have to be me.’
She picked up the telephone in the hall with reluctance. ‘Could I speak to someone about the Eileen Caseley case? The murder at Moortown? …’
She came back to the kitchen to report.
‘They’re still over at the incident room in Moortown. We must have passed it on the bus. But she’ll see us at the police headquarters here at nine tomorrow morning.’
‘She?’ asked Millie.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Brewer.’
SEVEN
Tom and Suzie marched up the steps of the police headquarters; Tom juggled the large survey nail in his hand. Halfway up he stopped. He looked back. Suzie turned as well.
Dave stood at the foot of the steps. His face, below the ginger hair, was pale. Suzie saw the scared expression in his eyes as he looked up at the police station entrance.
Tom was at his side in a few strides. ‘It’s OK, man. You’re on their side now. Queen’s evidence. No one’s going to hold the past against you. It never was your fault, anyway.’
Dave gulped. Suzie’s heart ached with sudden realization. Two years ago, a teenage girl had died. Tom had fallen under suspicion of her murder, and Dave had concealed vital facts that could have cleared him. In the end, the verdict had been accidental death. Dave had received a suspended sentence for withholding evidence.
Suzie could see him now reliving that nightmare as the police station loomed above him.
Slowly, reluctantly, he let Tom lead him up the steps.
‘Can’t you see, it will work in your favour?’ Tom was saying. ‘Another murder … Idiot! I mean another violent death, and you’re bang on the nail with evidence. They can’t criticize you this time, can they? Don’t worry. I’ll do the talking.’
Tom has this sunny confidence, Suzie thought, that he has only to flash those bright blue eyes at anyone and throw them that engaging smile and they’ll fall at his feet. To be honest, people usually did.
Chief Detective Inspector Alice Brewer was intimidatingly tall. The impression was heightened by her long, thin face and the even longer, fairish hair which fell straight to her collarbones. She was beanpole slim.
She looked at the three of them, seated before her. Her eyes settled on Suzie. ‘I’m told you have information concerning the death of Eileen Caseley. Do you want to tell me about it?’
Suzie had half expected this, whatever Tom’s assertion that he would speak for them. She had been the one who made the phone call to book this appointment. For all Tom’s ready confidence, she was his mother, a generation older.
‘I suppose I ought to start with last Saturday. We … that is, my husband and I and my son and daughter, were out in Saddlers Wood …’
‘Your husband has already signed a statement about that,’ DCI Brewer said crisply. ‘Shall we get to the point?’
Suzie was beginning to feel not so much a mature adult as a chastened schoolgirl.
‘Tom, my son, and Dave thought there might be more to the incident in the woods. They wanted to have another look. I tried to dissuade him at first, but when I saw he was set on going I decided it might be better if I went too.’
‘So. You tried to dissuade him. You obviously thought it was a bad idea.’
Suzie felt herself colouring. ‘Nobody seemed very interested in what we said about someone else being there in the woods, possibly hiding from us. But I couldn’t be sure that you weren’t taking it more seriously than you let us know.’
The chief inspector’s fingertips drummed on the table.
‘But then,’ Suzie went on, ‘when we got near the farm, we could see that there was no police tape across the footpath that led to that clearing. And there was none when we got to the ruined cottage. It didn’t look as though you were treating it as part of the crime scene. But Tom and Dave went on further than we did on Saturday. They found this area outside the wood, like a small piece of moorland. And somebody, probably more than one person, had certainly been there, trampling all over the place.’
‘So you thought you would trample all over it too? How did you know it wasn’t the police who had been there?’
‘I found this!’ Tom exclaimed, lifting up the long, broad nail he had been holding under the table. ‘Doesn’t look as though there’d been a police search, does it? You could hardly have missed this.’
DCI Brewer took a tissue from a box on the table. She reached across and took the nail from Tom, holding it carefully in the paper. She examined the raised lettering on the head, then laid it on the table in front of her. When she leaned her long thin neck towards Tom her eyes were steely.
‘I see. You thought you’d
play detective in a murder case. You decided the police weren’t up to the job. So all three of you trample in with your footprints all over the scene. You pick up what, by your own admission, you believed to be vital evidence. With your grubby hands. You make no attempt to preserve any fingerprints that might be on it. A single phone call was all it needed. I was only two miles away in Moortown. I could have had a squad of officers over there in minutes. We could have done a professional search.’ The adjective was loaded with scorn. ‘But no, you knew better.’
Suzie saw Tom blush fiercely as her words hit home.
‘It was my fault,’ she protested. ‘I found it first.’
Tom ignored her. ‘You didn’t seem to be taking our first report seriously,’ he countered.
‘How did you know what we might or might not have done yesterday morning? The police are not obliged to report to the Fewings family on how they are handling this case.’
Suzie felt herself growing smaller in her chair.
She tried to defend Tom – all of them. ‘It could be significant, couldn’t it? You’ve arrested Philip Caseley. I’ve no idea what went on between him and Eileen. But I talked to a woman on the bus back to Moortown. There is someone interested in opening up mining in this area, and the local people are dead against it, including Philip. It may have nothing to do with his wife’s death, but it suggests evidence that there was some hostility, doesn’t it? We saw Philip going down that path on Saturday. And we’re pretty sure there was someone else in the woods.’
‘Yes. I have your report in front of me. And why, precisely, would that be a motive for that person to kill Eileen Caseley?’
Her voice was icy. She went on relentlessly.
‘And if there was any evidence of value in this area you’re talking about, you seem to have done your best to ensure that there will be nothing left for the police to find. One phone call. That was all it needed. You didn’t even have to touch this nail. I’ll get an officer to take your statements.’
They were dismissed like naughty children.
‘I told you I didn’t want to come!’ Dave burst out at the foot of the steps.
‘Stay cool, man. She hardly spoke to you. It was me she was gunning for. Well, and Mum. Sorry.’ Tom turned to Suzie. ‘I got you into this.’
‘Not entirely. I walked into it with my eyes open. I could have let you go back to Saddlers Wood on your own.’
‘But you guessed we were heading into trouble and you wanted to be there to stop a diplomatic incident. That’s over and above the call of duty, Mum.’ He gave her that bewitching smile.
‘Well, partly. But I have to admit I was curious myself. I know we didn’t have much to go on, but I couldn’t bear the thought that they might pin it on an innocent man because we hadn’t said anything.’
‘You’re forgetting something,’ Dave said morosely. ‘Ballistics. They must know by now whether she was killed with Philip Caseley’s gun.’
Tom and Suzie stopped dead in the middle of the police station car park. A cold hand closed over Suzie’s heart. How could she not have thought of that? She had an instant vivid picture of Philip Caseley emerging from the footpath at the side of the track, gripping his shotgun. Of the shot that had echoed through the still country air only moments earlier. What, or whom, had the farmer been firing at then? Had Eileen Caseley been killed with that same gun, with the sort of lead shot you would use on a pheasant or rabbit? Or could a shotgun fire a single bullet? Did Philip Caseley have another weapon – a rifle, perhaps? And could she honestly tell the difference?
She knew an intense frustration that these were questions she could not ask the police.
It was, DCI Brewer had made abundantly clear, nothing to do with her.
And yet she felt that it was. She had met a frightened woman in that farmyard. Instead of trying harder to find out what was wrong, she had asked her trivial questions about family history. She had encroached on the hospitality of a woman who clearly had little time or money to spare. Her thoughts had been in the past, and she had allowed herself to close her mind to what was happening in the present, to tell herself precisely what Chief Inspector Brewer thought: that it was none of her business.
And yet … Was it only that feeling of instinctive alarm for her personal safety that had changed her mind? That crack of dead wood from the trees around the clearing? That sense of someone watching her unseen?
Still, when she had made that first phone call to the police on Saturday evening, it had certainly been domestic violence she had been afraid of – the apparently obvious conclusion that Eileen Caseley had been threatened by her husband.
A tiny voice reminded her of that old newspaper report about Richard Day finding his neighbour’s wife dead on the kitchen floor. Her fleeting thought that he might have been in some way involved. She pushed the thought away.
If Philip Caseley had been opposing someone who was prospecting for minerals, that might make him a target. But that was very far-fetched. And why should it put Eileen in danger? Dave was right; if the police were still holding Philip Caseley, it must be because they knew she had been shot with his gun.
She shook herself back to the present.
‘Sorry, folks. I’ve got to fly. I’m an hour late for work already.’
EIGHT
Three weeks later, Millie looked up from leafing through the local paper.
‘Here, Mum, this’ll interest you. There’s an announcement of the funeral of that woman who was shot.’
She passed the paper over, pointing to the place on the page.
Suzie read the brief details. Two p.m. at the church of St Michael in Moortown. No flowers. Donations to the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution. There was no mention of the dramatic way Eileen Caseley had met her death.
There was a sad finality about it. It was as though all the phone calls and the statements to the police, that search in Saddlers Wood, had been an attempt to stave off the reality of what had happened. As though they could discover something that would reverse the terrible truth.
But holding the paper in her hand, looking at the black-and-white notice of the funeral, brought it home in all its inevitability. Eileen Caseley was dead. Murdered. They would never again see that careworn woman who had given them cups of tea and tried her best to cover up the agitation she had clearly been feeling. Whatever they might have done to help her, it was too late now.
Millie’s voice seemed to come to her from a great distance.
‘Do you suppose they’ll let her husband out to go to the funeral?’
The church of St Michael the Archangel was set back, in a large churchyard, from the square in Moortown. As she stepped off the bus, Suzie was struck by its size. It seemed out of proportion to the little town on the fringes of the moor.
Her historian’s mind provided the instant answer. Wool. In centuries gone by, the sheep of the West Country had provided the woollen cloth for which it was famous. Woolmasters had grown rich on the trade and expressed their gratitude through the endowment of large churches. A branch of her own family had been among them. Their names were inscribed on grave slabs set in the floor of the aisle.
The dwindling population of modern times could surely not provide a regular congregation to fill such a building.
But today the square was thick with people in sober dress, making their way towards the church.
Suzie wondered if they were all friends of Eileen Caseley. Did that woman on the bus speak for many others who protested Philip’s innocence? Or were they simply drawn to the funeral by the notoriety of the murder?
As she joined the flow of people through the churchyard gate, Suzie felt that had been an unworthy thought. Most faces had a solemn look, in keeping with their black clothes. It was not sensationalism that had drawn them here, but rather, a strong sense of community.
What had brought her here – a single meeting with the dead woman?
She found it hard to explain, even to herself, what had made h
er come. She hadn’t told Nick or the children. She had not asked Nick if she could use the car this afternoon. Nick had a successful architectural practice and Suzie a small independent income from running the office of a charity. The Fewings could have afforded a second car, but there was a good bus service in the cathedral city. Suzie only needed to go beyond the reach of public transport on family history expeditions to rural parishes, or on country walks, and then Nick was always happy to drive her.
So today she had dressed in a white shirt and grey skirt, with a mauve jacket, and taken the bus. Looking at the sea of black around her she felt a surprised strangeness. At her Methodist church it was more common to have a small family funeral service at the cemetery or crematorium, and then a big service at the church to celebrate that person’s life.
Here, the setting was more traditional. Except … she caught a sharp breath of indignation. Television cameras were set up, filming the mourners as they approached the church door. Other photographers jostled among the gravestones, vying with each other for the best shots. As the bulbs flashed, she had a startled mental image of herself on tonight’s TV or in the next edition of the local paper. She would need to explain to the family what she was doing here. She was still not sure that she could.
But no, she wasn’t important. Editors would want a more dramatic photograph. The husband? Just for a moment Suzie checked her step on the cobbled path. Would they let Philip Caseley out of prison to attend his wife’s funeral. Would he appear in handcuffs? Then it occurred to her that the son from Australia must be here. What would that meeting of father and son be like?
She carried on walking, more soberly now. She had fallen into the obvious way of thinking that Philip must be guilty. But what if he were not? She tried to think of the torment he must be going through, with everyone he knew suspecting him, perhaps even his son.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought you said you’d only seen her the once.’
Suzie looked up with a guilty start. It took a moment for her to place the rosy-faced woman in a black coat and skirt, who had just spoken to her reprovingly. Then she remembered. The neighbouring farmer who had been driving her Land Rover to see to the Caseleys’ sheep.