by David Field
‘Have you got any better ideas?’ Mike asked him.
‘No, frankly, but I thought you wanted me to follow up the Troy Lesley angle.’
‘Still do, but even more so now. I’m beginning to suspect that what we have there on the screen was also on the USB that got Jeremy Giles killed. Somebody didn’t want the penny to drop with anyone other than the late Jeremy Giles, and it never occurred to them that Troy Lesley’s understanding of local history probably didn’t extend back beyond his last fix.’
‘OK, I’ll take you at your word, and leave you with your history jigsaw,’ Dave confirmed as he rose from Mike’s chair and headed for the outer office. He paused in the doorway and jerked his head towards Geoff and Cathy’s hunched backs as they continued scrutinising the spoils from Giles’s dusty collection.
‘Do you still need those two?’
‘More than I did half an hour ago,’ Mike assured him. ‘Somehow or other we have to go back through five hundred years of records, trying to match up the names of those who did the deed on Ursula Winthrop with subsequent hanging deaths that were swept under the carpet.’
‘Needle in haystack stuff,’ Dave snorted. ‘For a start, the direct descendants wouldn’t have the same names once the line passed through a female who got married, and secondly they may well have moved away from the area long before Victoria and Albert built their many museums and art galleries. Good luck,’ he added as he passed through the outer office, shouting a cheery ‘Either of you got a History degree?’ to Geoff and Cathy as they raised their heads to acknowledge his departure.
‘He probably wasn’t kidding about a History degree,’ Mike conceded as he walked out behind Dave’s retreating figure, ‘and the only one I know with that qualification I married nearly thirty years ago. But here’s what I need, so I’ll let you divide the goodies between you when I’ve explained what’s involved.’
He walked across to the whiteboard, which now contained the names of all those who had been the subject of the original Plaint.
‘Sometime around 1615 – and I mean the year 1615, not quarter past four – this lot whose names are listed in purple did in an old lady called Ursula Winthrop in a wood which is now Cavendish Square, over in the West End. They got away with it then, but my working theory is that in the intervening years, someone’s been evening the score with those they left behind. The murder of Jeremy Giles was, I now have reason to believe, in order to keep his mouth permanently shut on the connection he’d made between this event and a series of deaths involving members of the Pockridge family – the same Pockridge as on that list up there on the wall. If I’m right, then we should find that descendants of the others met a similar fate. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to prove me right.’
‘Sometime during the past five hundred years?’ Geoff enquired in hushed disbelief.
‘Yep,’ Mike confirmed, ‘and not only that, but anywhere in the UK. Don’t ask me where, just - well, just somewhere.’
‘I’ll start with the PNC, obviously,’ Cathy grinned enthusiastically. ‘All those days on training courses have to count for something. Let’s hope I can still remember how it works.’
‘When you find out,’ Mike advised her, ‘your first student will be me. But don’t build up your hopes – it only goes back to the 1970s, as I recall, and after that you’re in unknown territory.’
‘Then what?’ Geoff enquired. Mike nodded down at the piles of paper all over their desks.
‘Start with those files marked with folio numbers. Giles hit the jackpot with the Pockridge file, and the others may be equally accurate. Each of those folios, for all we know, contains a clue to a victim.’
‘And the offenders?’ Cathy enquired. Mike’s face froze.
“That’s going to be the hard bit, which is why I’ve kept it for myself. All I have are the names of the two women who brought the original complaint, and they were both called Winthrop – presumably her daughters or something. If the killings were an act of revenge, then somehow it involves the descendants of two women who changed their names if they got married, and probably hid their illegitimate offspring if they didn’t.’
‘Good luck,’ Geoff grinned.
‘I think I’m going to need it, right enough,’ Mike agreed, ‘but as Fate would have it, I think I know where I can get some professional assistance.’
He glanced across at the wall clock.
‘It’s almost half past three, so clear your desks of all but those folio files, then enjoy an early finish for the day. We start at nine in the morning on the dot, down in the Dining Hall, and breakfast’s on me. Last one in gets to lay out the cutlery and serviettes.’
Chapter Eight
Alison placed the whiskey and soda on the coffee table in front of him, kissed him affectionately on the back of the neck, and glanced down at the large volume he’d just extracted from the bookshelf.
‘A bit late to be re-sitting your Finals,’ she joked. Mike smiled up at her.
‘English Legal History was a first-year subject at Leeds. I was just confirming something I half remembered from Prof. Dunning’s mind-numbingly boring lectures. Do you know that in the Seventeenth Century, women were not regarded in some quarters as reliable enough to swear an oath? As a result, with the only two complainants in the unjust lynching of a suspected witch being her daughters – well, two women anyway – those responsible were never prosecuted.’
‘I have to put the pasta in the oven,’ Alison replied, ‘but I can give you another probable reason why they were ignored, if it was early Seventeenth Century.’
‘1615,’ Mike confirmed.
‘Perfect,’ Alison replied with a knowing smile. ‘Smack bang in the middle of the reign of James 1st, who was obsessed with witchcraft. Assuming that the complaint was made to some royal official, it was more than their job would have been worth to stand in the way of a good witch lynching, whether the unfortunate accused really was a witch or not.’
‘I knew I married you for a reason,’ Mike smiled at her rounded bottom as she bent down to open the oven door. She stood back up, brushed the hair from her face, and grinned back.
‘If nothing else, it legitimised our children when they came along, the younger of whom will be here in time for dinner on Thursday.’
‘Steven?’ Mike enquired in some surprise.
‘Do we have a younger child I don’t remember giving birth to?’ Alison quipped back as she reached into the fridge for some fresh vegetables to make the accompanying salad.
‘Of course not,’ Mike replied, ‘but we don’t normally hear from him except at Xmas and ... oh shit, his birthday’s coming up, isn’t it?’
‘Next Tuesday, and before you assure me that you’ve no idea what to get him for his twenty-second, he’s solved that problem for you as well. He wants a set of golf clubs.’
‘He can have mine,’ Mike replied with a relieved smile. ‘I never use them these days anyway.’
It was Alison’s turn to smile sweetly as she reached for her favourite paring knife from the block.
‘With all the love in the world, darling, I hardly think our son and heir would want to be seen on the golf course with a set of battered irons in a tatty old bag that all look as if they came from a local pawn shop.’
‘But a brand new set will cost hundreds,’ he objected.
‘Five hundred, according to Steven. At least, that’s the best price he could find in Manchester.’
‘You mean five hundred that will no longer be available for the re-paint?’
‘Nice try, sweetheart, but you start on the guest bedroom as soon as Steven leaves. And please don’t go out and murder someone, just to give yourself the usual excuse about pressure of work.’
‘Why’s he taken up golf, anyway?’
‘Apparently his new girlfriend’s father’s an American pro golfer. And a singer.’
‘I’ve never managed to play golf and sing at the same time.’
‘The father’s t
he golfer, and the girlfriend’s the singer.’
‘At least he has a girlfriend – I was beginning to wonder.’
‘So was I, to tell you the truth, but I just put it down to wanting grandchildren. The way Melanie goes on about her career aspirations, I think we’ll wait long enough in that department.’
‘Well, if he wants me to play golf with him, he can whistle. I give him reason enough to give me that embarrassed, patronising, sympathetic look of his when I fail to live up to expectations. However, Dave Petrie’s looking for a partner for Sunday, so Steven can get some free lessons at the same time. And talking of Dave Petrie and his partners, you still having lunch with Joy tomorrow?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Just that Dave’s worried that she might be going off him. Apparently something’s got her distracted of late.’
‘Funnily enough, she sounded a bit – well, anxious is how I’d describe it - when she phoned and almost begged me to meet her for lunch. I hope things are OK between her and Dave.’
‘So do I – the last thing I need is him moping around the office, bacon sandwich in hand, and heart on sleeve.’
‘Talking of things on sleeves,’ Alison replied as she walked back to the settee with an accusing look, ‘please tell me that’s blood or something, and not marmalade.’
‘Guilty as charged,’ Mike replied ruefully, ‘but it was a token of the high esteem in which I’m held by my latest team. Did I tell you my new nickname in the office, by the way?’
‘It’s got to be better than “Thunderbum” anyway,’ Alison replied, ‘and you only get one helping of pasta bake. Some women have to cope with their husbands fancying other women – my main rival seems to be an old English preserve.’
Chapter Nine
‘What are we looking for, anyway?’ Geoff enquired as he lifted another forkful of scrambled egg from his breakfast plate.
‘Hangings, principally,’ Mike advised him, spreading the marmalade thickly onto his only slice of toast while Cathy spooned into a strawberry yoghurt and raised an enquiring eyebrow.
‘There must be thousands of those on the PNC,’ she objected. ‘Can we be a bit more specific?’
‘We can,’ Mike replied. ‘The chances are that they passed under the radar as either “unsolved” or suicides. And we’re looking for something grimly ritualistic, like someone was trying to make their point. The last two we know of for sure featured the letter “U”. In Giles’s case it was carved into his back, while for Emma Baynton it was daubed on the wall alongside her body.’
Cathy shuddered slightly, and put down her spoon.
‘A “U” standing for “Ursula”, presumably?’
‘That’s my working theory, anyway,’ Mike confirmed. ‘But if we go back only twenty years, it was presumably a different team in operation, so they may have chosen another tag, or another way of sending out their message.’
‘Can you programme the PNC to give you that level of detail?’ Geoff asked.
‘Yes, so far as I can recall,’ Cathy assured him. ‘But before you both go expecting miracles, remember that I’ve only done the theory, and the last refresher course was almost a year ago now, and it was refreshing nothing, since I’ve never handled the system in “live” mode, only in simulations.’
‘You’re still closer to it than either of us,’ Mike reminded her, ‘and if you can isolate “hanging”, “suicide”, “unsolved” and something like a weird tag at the crime scene, that should narrow it down a bit.’
‘Probably down to the final ten thousand,’ Geoff joked, then caught the warning look in Cathy’s eyes and straightened his face.
‘What’s this, the Last Supper?’ Dave breezed over Geoff’s shoulder as he placed a plate of bacon sandwiches and a mug of coffee on the table next to him.
‘Before you bite self-righteously into that first bacon sarnie,’ Mike admonished him, ‘I’m still waiting for news of Troy Lesley’s last encounter with the forces of virtue and light.’
‘Already on the CMS,’ Dave smirked. ‘Seems he got himself thrown out of the Central Library for creating a disturbance, then accused a security guard of assault, against which he claimed to have rightly defended himself, before Uniform carted him off, still protesting.’
‘Needs further elaboration,’ Mike replied. ‘Get the Uniforms who lifted him to sing us a song sometime today, my office.’
‘Will do,’ Dave confirmed. ‘Now may I take the first bite?’
‘You may,’ Mike advised him, ‘but while you’re all here, please be advised that my wife would be eternally grateful if you lot would refrain from feeding me while I’m at work. I need to preserve both my waistline and my marriage, so no more little treats to keep Paddington sweet, OK?’
‘Did she chew your balls off?’ Dave enquired as he sat in front of Mike’s desk thirty minutes later.
‘Almost, although given her very expensive prosthetic lower plate, it was more of a painful suck,’ Mike joked back. ‘But I assume that you didn’t come down here just to ask me that, so what is it?’
‘A couple of things. May be nothing, but here goes. First off, one of the Uniforms who nicked Troy Lesley in the Central Library’s coming in around mid-morning during his break. He’s still on days, although his partner from that incident’s been transferred to night mobiles armed with a breathalyser, so it’ll only be one version at this stage. The second is that from what I can make of his report, the boy had a few marks consistent with his having been gripped hard around the neck, which the security guard in the Library claimed happened when Troy began to try to escape his grasp, having assaulted him to begin with. You still following me?’
‘Yes, but the significance of all this has yet to ignite a bright light in my brain.’
‘Well, here’s the other bit. I probably shouldn’t have, but I asked Joy to bring home a copy of the security guard’s report. Apparently they’re all filed within twenty-four hours, and archived within forty-eight, so she was able to access it. Was that OK?’
‘Depends what it said.’
‘It said nothing about any assault by Troy on the guard, who claims to have detained him solely for causing a breach of the peace in a public library.’
‘So Troy gave the bloke a mouthful, thereby failing the attitude test, and the security goon registered his displeasure in the only way he knew how. And was forced to restrain him until the cavalry arrived.’
‘All the same, if he had right on his side, why invent the story to the Uniforms about Troy assaulting him, if not to cover up more injuries than were consistent with a simple restraint, which you can learn on Day One of Security Management 101 at the local college?’
‘Where’s all this leading, just out of curiosity?’
‘I’ve got a funny feeling that the guard was after the USB, which Troy was trying to flog in the Library. Remember how Kevin told us that Troy was hoping to sell it at the uni or somewhere?’
‘And there’s nothing in any of the reports about a USB?’
‘Nothing I could see, anyway. Perhaps PC Ainsworth can tell us more when he comes in. Around eleven, that should be.’
‘OK, thanks for that, Dave. You might want to get your lot to join in the egg and spoon race Cathy’s organising through the PNC. The more hands to the screens, the better.’
‘Will do.’ He began to walk out, then turned, and in a feigned casual tone, enquired ‘Alison still lunching with Joy today?’
‘So she confirmed last night. Don’t worry, Dave, anything I learn will be shared with you tomorrow.’
‘Thanks. By the way, ACC Willows phoned to ask me if you’d lost it, or really needed a gynaecologist?’
Mike grinned.
‘I wondered how he’d react when he read that requisition request. The next time he takes you into his confidence, over my head it would seem, assure him that I’ve not gone senile yet.’
Mike was able to reassure him personally when he was summoned up to the ACC’s office at ten, to fi
nd coffee cups and shortbread biscuits laid out on the long table behind which Andy Willows sat with a bemused expression.
‘I really haven’t lost it, Andy,’ Mike assured him as he reached for a biscuit.
‘We’ll talk about your request for a gynaecologist in a minute,’ Willows announced as he stirred his coffee. ‘First of all, tell me why the whole of Homicide 2 seems to be embarked on the biggest blitz we’ve ever conducted on the PNC, which incidentally has provoked Maidenhead into sending me an official “please explain”, which at present I can’t.’
‘Geneologist,’ Mike corrected him with a grin. ‘Someone who delves into your ancestry. Laura needs handwriting lessons’
‘OK, let’s start with that first,’ Willows conceded. ‘How much, how long, and why?’
‘No idea how much, although I can probably get a ball-park quote to you by close of play. As for how long, make it a fortnight at an outside guess, and the “why” is connected to your query about the PNC.’
‘Try me with that, then,’ Willows grumbled. Mike took another mouthful of coffee, put down his cup and stared into the middle distance.
‘As you know, Homicide 2, under my overall supervision, are investigating the death of Jeremy Giles, local journalist and author, who was done to death in an abandoned industrial building near the river. We believe that his death is connected with something he knew about a series of murders stretching back a number of years, all related to an original incident in the Seventeenth Century, when a woman was murdered and the authorities turned a blind eye.’
‘Is it “we” believe, or you believe?’ Willows interrupted. Mike smiled.
‘Dave Petrie really has been getting into your ear, hasn’t he? Even if he doesn’t share my hunch about the cause of all this, he has to accept that Giles’s death had all the hallmarks of a revenge ritual.’
‘Go on.’
‘Papers and other stuff we’ve managed to unearth that were in Giles’s possession suggest that someone – or, presumably, several people spread over several generations – has been picking off the direct descendents of a group of locals who were responsible for the lady’s death. Her name was Ursula Winthrop, and here in Brampton I’ve identified five suspicious deaths going back to 1938 that are connected to the group that lynched her all those years ago.’