Cuthbert's Way: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 17)

by LJ Ross

  “Poor bastard,” Phillips muttered, and was forced to look away, or else embarrass himself.

  Father Jacob’s body had not yet been moved, the forensics team having decided to leave it in situ to allow them to complete their work as fully as possible. Moving a body ahead of time could mean losing vital trace evidence, so this was done only with the approval of the Supervising CSI and the SIO managing the case. It made for difficult viewing, but it was better to see exactly how the man’s killer had left him.

  “Somebody went to town,” Ryan said, after a moment’s silence for the dead.

  They were kitted out in protective suits and, with Patel’s nod of approval, stepped further into the large, barn-like space to get a better view of what had been laid out for them to discover.

  Ryan stood there for long minutes, a tall, raven-haired man with an unreadable expression on his face, until Patel cast a concerned glance towards Phillips.

  “Is he okay?” she muttered, jerking her thumb at Ryan’s back. “Does he always just…stand there, silently?”

  “Oh, aye,” Phillips said, with a breezy wave of his gloved hand. “Don’t worry, he does it all the time.”

  Ryan didn’t hear their by-play, his attention being otherwise occupied with tracing the details of the scene. There was a sense of drama here, he thought; as though everything had been arranged to the killer’s satisfaction. If one discounted the shattered and defiled body of Father Jacob, which took centre stage, nothing was unusual—but there were elements that struck Ryan as being out of place. For one thing, there were four multi-coloured jars sitting on one of the window ledges, no larger than perfume bottles, which most certainly did not look as though they belonged in a dusty cider mill.

  “Have you looked at those bottles?” he asked, pointing to the ledge on the other side of the room.

  “I’m sure the CSIs will get around to it,” Patel said, frowning in their direction. “I don’t see the significance—”

  “Discounting the blood and gore, the rest of this place is covered in dust,” Ryan said, sweeping a hand around the airy space. “You said it’s rarely used out of season, right?”

  Patel nodded.

  “Then those bottles are significant, because they’ve been polished—very recently,” he explained. “It might be nothing, but—”

  “It could be something,” Patel agreed, and made a mental note. “Thank you, I’ll see to it.”

  When she moved off to speak to one of the CSIs, Ryan looked around him again, this time noting the placement of a heavy wooden worktable. It stood to the left of Father Jacob’s body and, judging by the marks on the floor, had been shifted slightly towards him.

  Why, he couldn’t fathom.

  No bloodstains marred its wooden surface, and it held nothing but a single white feather that hung precariously from the edge, as though it might fall to the floor.

  A feather?

  Ryan moved closer, walking with extreme care until he came to the edge of the worktable, where he could study the offending object.

  “Patel?”

  She looked up from her discussion with one of the CSIs and moved across to where he stood.

  “Found something?”

  “Ask them to look at this feather,” he said, flummoxing her again. “It seems out of place.”

  Patel looked between him and the feather, wondering why Ryan wasn’t talking about the body and was instead wasting his time thinking about stray feathers.

  “I’d be interested to know which bird this feather comes from,” Ryan continued, thinking that, as with soil samples, bird samples could prove to be a useful source of geographical information. “I wonder whether the killer brought it with him, because I don’t see any other signs of bird activity in here, nor any broken windows to allow a bird to get inside. Therefore, how did it get in here?”

  Now, he had her attention.

  “Another thing,” he said quietly. “There’s a steady breeze in here, but the feather hasn’t blown away…”

  He trailed off and dropped down to his haunches, craning his neck to try to see if the underside of the feather was stuck on a splinter of the wooden countertop.

  Then, he spotted it.

  Blood.

  “Look here,” he said, and drew Patel down beside him so she could see what he had seen. “They’ve used blood to keep the feather in place.”

  He was right, she realised. Whoever placed the feather there had very carefully dipped the underside in some of Father Jacob’s blood, ensuring it wouldn’t blow away. They knew this, because there were no other bloodstains on or around the table, which made their discovery all the more significant.

  She called across to one of the CSIs, who rustled forward to photograph it.

  “Why would anybody do that?” she wondered. “The bottles, the feather…what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Ryan admitted.

  “Aye, well, I do,” Phillips said, matter-of-factly, from where he’d been making a thorough job of inspecting the doorway. “It means we’ve got a fully-fledged fruitcake on our hands, that’s what it means.”

  Ryan allowed himself to look properly at Father Jacob’s body, wincing at the multitude of cuts and gashes against the man’s waxy grey skin, then allowing his eyes to travel upward to where his skull had been crushed like a pumpkin.

  “You know what, Frank? I think you might be right.”

  * * *

  An hour after they’d first entered the stifling interior of the cider mill, Ryan, Phillips and Patel stepped back out into the orchard to find that a light snow had begun to fall, coating the barren trees in a film of powdery white. They stood there for a moment breathing in the cold air, allowing it to cleanse their bodies and their minds.

  “So, what do you think?” Patel asked. “Are there any similarities with Faber?”

  They began retracing their steps along the plastic walkway.

  “In the method of killing? Not really,” Ryan said. “Edward Faber was tortured with a knife but, unlike here, his killer used water beforehand.”

  “Maybe they didn’t have an apple press handy,” Phillips said, and patted his belly as it gave a loud, ill-timed rumble. “Seems to me, whoever killed both men liked to travel light.”

  Ryan nodded, acknowledging the truth of that. In both cases, all the killer seemed to have used was a knife, which hadn’t been recovered from either scene. The water and the apple press were opportunistic.

  “You’ve got a point,” he said, and turned back to Patel. “Have the CSIs found much in the way of trace evidence?”

  “Not yet,” she replied. “They were careful, by the looks of things.”

  Just like Faber, he thought.

  Ryan happened to agree with the old adage that killers always left traces of themselves behind—if not DNA or fingerprints, then something more subtle—which was why he looked at their mess and destruction with a discerning eye. In this case, he found the use of the cider press interesting; not merely because it was macabre, but because it was unnecessarily dangerous.

  “I wonder whether killing Father Jacob in the cider mill was a matter of accident, or design,” he said. “After all, if somebody wanted to kill him quickly, they’d have been far safer finishing him in the boarding house.”

  “But if the object was to torture, not to kill quickly, perhaps they didn’t know how long it would take for him to crack,” Patel remarked. “The question is, why torture him in the first place?”

  Phillips opened his mouth to venture a reason to do with a forged cross, St. Cuthbert’s cult, but one look from Ryan reminded him that there were some things they could not share.

  “Ah, do you have any ideas about why?” he prevaricated.

  She looked up at the school, which rose above them from the summit of a gentle hill, and wondered.

  “Generally speaking, ultra-violent torture of that kind is perpetrated for one of three reasons: retribution, as a warning to others—usually, in gang warfare
—or in order to extract information,” she said, logically. “What was the reason in your case with Faber?”

  Ryan and Phillips immediately donned blank expressions.

  “Unfortunately, we’re still trying to get to the bottom of that,” Ryan said, making a rare exception to his rule about always practising honesty. “Our best guess is that Faber’s underworld past came back to haunt him, and it was a case of a good deal gone bad. The investigation is ongoing.”

  In truth, they had a very good idea of why Faber had been tortured, and of the information he’d revealed under sufferance. However, telling Patel would be tantamount to a confession that the recovered cross—now reinstalled in its glass cabinet in Durham Cathedral—was nothing but a fake, and would blow their whole cover and the covert investigation that had been underway for months.

  If Patel thought they were evasive, she said nothing of it.

  “With his connection to Cuthbert and that cross having been stolen so recently, plus the fact he was tortured, I thought perhaps there’d have been something to link the two cases. Have you looked into the possibility of Faber having been connected to the theft of that cross?” she wondered, innocently.

  Ryan gave her a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  “We’ve considered most possibilities,” he said, blandly. “Perhaps there’s another reason for Father Jacob’s death.”

  “At first glance, he seems to have been squeaky clean,” Patel said. “On the other hand, there’s a bit of a stereotype about Catholic priests, and—”

  She paused, trying to find a polite way to put it.

  “This is a school, the Catholic Church doesn’t have an exemplary track record where safeguarding is concerned, and there’s no smoke without fire,” Ryan finished for her.

  “Exactly. As I said, we’re coming to this investigation with an open mind, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

  No truer word spoken, Ryan thought, and hoped she didn’t scratch too deep—for her own sake.

  CHAPTER 12

  Before they left Patel and her team to continue their investigation, Ryan made two requests. The first was to see St. Cuthbert’s boarding house, where the late Father Jacob had spent much of his time, which afforded a brief opportunity to search for any obvious clue about what the monk had known, or been in possession of, that was so important as to have cost him his life. The second was to meet the man who’d decided that one beagle’s nose was more reliable than the full force of North Yorkshire CID.

  After an unproductive search of the dead man’s rooms, the three police officers made their way through a wide, marble foyer and along corridors that were noticeably quiet, passing gilt-edged paintings of dignitaries until Phillips was forced to ask an obvious question.

  “Where are all the kids? And why isn’t their artwork on the walls?”

  He’d expected to see a bunch of smart-looking boys and girls in straw boaters wandering around, but instead the place resembled a tomb.

  Patel checked her watch, which told her it was shortly after four o’clock.

  “Maybe still in lessons,” she guessed, half-heartedly. “And maybe they can’t paint for shit.”

  Phillips let out a booming laugh, which echoed along the hallway in surround sound.

  Ryan said nothing, remembering the rigid scheduling he’d learned to accept during his school days. As he thought of it, memories floated to the surface of his mind.

  Finley-Ryan! Is that tie an appropriate length?

  Smarten up!

  No mail today, Finley-Ryan. Perhaps next week, eh?

  Truant again, Ryan? What will your father say?

  “Ryan?”

  He snapped out of his reverie to find Phillips and Patel staring at him.

  “Sorry, I was miles away.”

  “Anything important?” Phillips asked.

  Ryan’s lips twisted. “No,” he said. “Just ghosts.”

  * * *

  They found Father Peter Larverne in his private office, which commanded a triple-aspect view of the lawns from its position directly beneath the main clocktower. It was a room the headmasters of Crayke had occupied for generations and he was now the proud incumbent, with the added distinction of being the youngest ever to hold the position, at the relatively tender age of thirty-seven.

  When they knocked politely at his door, they found he was not alone.

  “DCI Patel? Please do come in,” he said, gesturing them inside his domain. “I don’t know if you’ve met Father Samuel, our chaplain, here at the school.”

  A middle-aged man with a mild, unremarkable face stood up from where he’d been sitting in one of the easy chairs and shuffled forward.

  “No, I don’t think we’ve met,” Patel said.

  “I spoke with your sergeant,” Samuel said, a bit nervously, then turned to the headmaster. “I’ll leave you to it—”

  As he bade a hasty retreat, Patel’s calm voice stopped him in his tracks.

  “Actually, Father, perhaps you wouldn’t mind staying for a moment or two,” she said. “It would be useful to hear from both of you, to get a fuller picture of what happened last night and learn more about Father Jacob.”

  “Of course,” Samuel said. “Our brother was a very worthy man. I’ll do all I can to help your investigation.”

  “Quite right,” the headmaster approved. “Please, everybody, make yourselves comfortable.”

  He cast an enquiring eye over the two strangers in the room, making a brief inventory of their looks and demeanour. The younger man was taller, and of a military bearing—straight-backed, as though he were quite used to being inspected—and more than capable of conducting an inspection of his own, judging by the uncompromising expression marring his otherwise flawless face. He was arresting, if not a little unnerving.

  Father Peter smiled at himself, thinking that he’d never quite shaken the artist’s habit of studying line and form.

  Old habits die hard, so the saying went—an unfortunate turn of phrase given recent events.

  The elder man was equally compelling, for different reasons. His face was what he would have called ‘characterful’; rounded, but not soft, he bore the look of a fighting man from another era, one who might have used his bare fists, if the need arose. And yet, the toughness of his stance was belied by the warmth of his eyes, which invited company and conversation.

  Of the two, Father Peter didn’t know which he’d rather sketch first.

  “This is DCI Ryan and DS Phillips,” Patel said.

  She omitted to mention that they were visiting from another command area, because to do so would invite entirely too many questions, and time was running short. However, she needn’t have bothered. For all that Father Peter was a monk first and a headmaster second, his title demanded that he keep in touch with the secular world outside the walls of Crayke College, and he recognised Ryan’s name immediately.

  For reasons best known to himself, he chose not to mention it nor to ask why a celebrated detective from Northumberland had travelled all the way down to York.

  “Welcome,” was all he said. “Please, be seated.”

  Phillips and Patel took up the offer, while Ryan positioned himself beside the window, which had the deliberate effect of casting his face in shadow so that his expression could not be so easily read. Father Peter was an observer of people, it seemed, but, on this occasion, it was he who was the subject.

  “First, I’d like to thank you both for your cooperation in this matter,” Patel began, in crisp, professional tones. “We understand this must be a difficult ordeal.”

  Father Peter raised the tips of his fingers to his lips and expelled a heartfelt sigh.

  “Thank you for your empathy, chief inspector. It is, indeed, a very difficult moment for all of us here in the Crayke community.”

  Patel paused for a respectful couple of seconds, before launching into her line of questioning.

  “I understand you’ve both given statements to my colleagues, b
ut I wonder if you’d be good enough to go over some of it again, for us? It’s quite normal, during the course of a murder investigation,” she added.

  “Of course,” Father Peter said. “I echo Father Samuel’s words; we are all here to serve, however we may.”

  “Thank you. In that case, would you both kindly tell us when you last saw Father Jacob alive?”

  It was the headmaster who answered first.

  “I believe I last saw Jacob at early evening prayers, which began at four o’clock, in the abbey,” he said. “I enquired after his day, we exchanged a word or two about some of the children in St. Cuthbert’s, then he made his way back to the boarding house to oversee the boys’ dinner, at around five o’clock.”

  “How did he seem?” Patel asked.

  It was a question Ryan would have asked himself, but he was conscious that this was her show; they were merely invited guests.

  “Perfectly normal,” Father Peter replied. “There was nothing untoward, if that’s what you mean.”

  “He didn’t seem upset, or nervous, in any way?”

  “Not at all.”

  “What about communications—to your knowledge, had he received anything that might have upset him?”

  The headmaster smiled, with the kind of subtle condescension that set Ryan’s teeth on edge.

  “DCI Patel, our brother lived a quiet life, here at Crayke. He had very little contact with the outside world, and, therefore, scarcely had the opportunity to receive any communications that might have caused upset. He was a quiet, spiritual man, who enjoyed reading—”

  “Mainly Sherlock Holmes,” Father Samuel put in. “Our brother loved to read Conan Doyle.”

  “A man of good taste,” Ryan said, from the edge of the room.

  The Chaplain looked across at him, then nodded sadly.