Strawfoot

by David Hodges

‘How did you know Janice Young was going to change her story?’

  ‘A little bird told me.’

  ‘What little bird?’

  ‘Let’s just say a friend. Janice apparently rang him, burdened with guilt over what she had decided to do, and he tipped me the wink straight afterwards.’

  Kate thought quickly. ‘That could only have been Will Fallow or Neville Haslar,’ she said.

  Another laugh. ‘You suggesting I only have two friends?’

  She pulled her robe more tightly about her as the cold seeped through the thin fabric. ‘Only one, now Will Fallow has been murdered.’

  ‘What?’ Even in the moonlight she could see him jump. ‘Will’s dead?’

  She snorted. ‘Oh, p-lease. You know damned well he is – you were the one who stiffed him and you couldn’t have chosen a more barbaric way to do it.’

  ‘Me? Don’t talk crap. Why would I kill Will?’

  Kate chanced her arm. ‘I’ve no idea but your car was seen racing away from the scene.’

  He stared at her, his eyes white in the moonlight. ‘My car? That’s impossible.’

  ‘Not according to our witness.’

  ‘Witness? What witness?’

  ‘Local farmer you nearly ran down.’

  He shook his head vehemently. ‘I didn’t do this. I haven’t killed anyone. That’s what I came to tell you. You must believe me.’

  ‘How did you find out where I lived? Only the killer knew that.’

  ‘I accidentally clocked you on the road this afternoon and followed you here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘I thought it better to wait until after dark when it was safer.’

  ‘But why me?’

  ‘Because I thought I could trust you. I knew your history and how you stuck to your guns on the Twister case to make sure the right man was brought to book. And I suspect you’re trying to do the same thing again this time.’

  ‘OK, so talk to me now.’

  ‘I already did. I’ve told you I’m innocent.’

  Kate gave a hard laugh. ‘And you expect me to believe that, just because you say so? The only chance you have of proving your innocence is to hand yourself in.’

  He backed away from her slightly, even though the fence and the rhyne were between them. ‘No way.’

  ‘What, then?’

  He hesitated. ‘I think I know who Strawfoot really is.’

  Kate’s heart began to beat a lot faster. ‘So give me a name.’

  Another rapid shaking of the head. ‘Waste of time. Your DI and his team are already convinced it’s me. They won’t want you to tell them anything different because they’ll look stupid, so you’re on a sticky wicket with your so-called colleagues – I need to get you some proof first.’

  She emitted an irritable hiss. ‘And how do you expect to do that?’

  ‘By doing your job for you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Instead of answering her, he came up with a question of his own. ‘Do you read much?’

  ‘Read?’

  ‘Literature is the food of life,’ he replied.

  Kate stared at him, her bewilderment obvious. ‘What the hell are you talking about, man?’

  But a sudden incoherent shout put paid to any answer he might have given. It came from an open upstairs window of the cottage and, swinging round, Kate saw Hayden’s tousled head thrust through it in the blaze of the bedroom light.

  ‘Et tu, Brute?’ Copely’s voice said softly and when she turned back to where his hooded figure had been standing, she saw that he was gone, disappearing into the night as if he had never been there at all.

  ‘Stupid!’ Hayden rapped, his face pale as he leaned on his walking stick and stared at Kate in disbelief. ‘To go out there on your own in the middle of the night? What were you thinking?’

  Kate said nothing, simply stared down at her bare feet from the armchair in the living room and wriggled her toes. The two uniformed police officers, one the shift inspector, fidgeted uncomfortably in front of the open patio doors, nodding perfunctorily to another uniformed colleague as he emerged from the shadows of the garden with his torch, shaking his head. ‘Long gone,’ he declared unnecessarily.

  Kate shrugged, thinking that it had taken the police units a good twenty minutes to get to the cottage following her phone call, so what did they expect? ‘It’s pretty easy to lose yourself out on the Levels,’ she said. ‘He’s probably the other side of Glastonbury by now.’

  The inspector nodded. ‘We’ll be getting along anyway,’ he said, turning back towards the front door. ‘Nothing more we can do here.’

  Kate waited for Hayden’s outburst as the uniformed officers left and it came even before they had actually managed to drive away.

  ‘I asked you what you thought you were doing?’ he blazed. ‘I woke up to go to the loo, only to find that my wife was not in bed where she should have been but out in the blessed garden in just her nightdress having a conflab with a wanted killer!’

  ‘I wasn’t wearing just a nightdress,’ she retorted sullenly. ‘I had my robe on over the top. And we don’t know if he is the killer.’

  He raised his eyes to the beamed ceiling. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t split hairs, Kate. What you did was totally irresponsible. You could have ended up like one of those other women.’

  For no apparent reason, she suddenly started to snigger.

  He scowled. ‘What the devil are you laughing at?’ he demanded.

  ‘You,’ she chortled, ‘standing there and giving me a bollocking in your little yellow boxers and T-shirt. Do you realize how stupid you look with your thin hairy legs and big belly?’

  He glanced down at himself and grinned in spite of his anger. ‘Don’t change the subject,’ he said. ‘You were out of order and you know it.’

  She sighed. ‘And why was I out of order, Hayd?’ she queried wearily. ‘How was I to know who it was out there? I saw a torch, that’s all – and anyway, if Copley had meant me any harm, he would hardly have advertised his presence the way he did. He came here to protest his innocence, that’s all, and he took a hell of a risk doing it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you believe him?’

  She bit her lip. ‘I don’t know what to believe. There are so many ifs and buts in this case and Copely is too obvious a culprit.’

  ‘From what you’ve said, there’s enough evidence stacked against him.’

  ‘That’s just it – it’s all too pat. It’s as if we’ve been handed him on a plate.’

  He leaned back slightly to park his behind on the edge of the sideboard. ‘So who else have you got in mind?’ he said.

  She snorted. ‘That’s the problem – we don’t have anyone. And there’s something even more worrying, too. Just before Copely did his rapid foxtrot-oscar, he suggested that I couldn’t trust my own colleagues – especially Roscoe – and that they wouldn’t want their preconceived ideas about his guilt to be proven wrong.’

  ‘He was probably just trying to drive a wedge in between you and the team – you know, bugger up the investigation by sowing the seeds of doubt in your mind about your own colleagues.’

  ‘Possibly but he also said something really peculiar. He asked me if I did much reading—’

  ‘Reading?’

  ‘Yes, then he just said, “Et tu, Brute?” It didn’t make sense.’

  He frowned. ‘It might have done if you had read classical literature at uni instead of those daft foreign languages.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s all about William Shakespeare. In his play, Julius Caesar, Brutus was depicted as Caesar’s best friend and also the chap who conspired with other ne’er-do-wells to have him wasted at the senate.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, as Caesar lay dying, after being fatally stabbed, he says to his treacherous friend, “Et tu, Brute?”, which translates as the recrimina
tion, “And you too, Brutus?” Maybe Copely was warning that you could end up being stabbed in the back by your own team to preserve the status quo in the investigation.’

  ‘That’s bloody ridiculous.’

  ‘All part of the process of disinformation. Quite clever actually. Been used by politicians and military tacticians throughout history.’

  He yawned. ‘Anyway, I think that both Maurice Copely and Julius Caesar can wait until the morning. By the look of you, it’s time you got some shut-eye.’

  She also yawned and glanced at her watch. ‘Point taken. Maybe we can get four or five hours in anyway.’

  In fact they managed just three and a half. At precisely eight in the morning the telephone blasted through their dreams and, in her haste to grab the receiver, Kate sent her glass of water tumbling off the bedside cabinet on to the floor.

  ‘What is it?’ Hayden grumbled, hoisting himself up on his elbows with a long groan and staring at her bleary eyed.

  Kate replaced the receiver with a shaking hand. ‘Control room,’ she said, her voice weak and strained. ‘There’s been another murder.’

  ‘A what? Who?’

  She met his gaze with a look of horror. ‘Denise Haslar,’ she replied. ‘Neville Haslar’s wife!’

  CHAPTER 21

  ‘ T hought you were told to get some rest?’ Roscoe growled when Kate joined him in front of the stable block after parking her Mazda in the allocated parking area with the half-dozen marked and plain police vehicles.

  She nodded, even in the comforting gloom of the familiar marshland mist that had come with the dawn conscious of her poorly brushed hair and the dark smudges still lurking under her eyes, which she had seen in the bathroom mirror before leaving home. ‘I tried,’ she said tartly, ‘but Hayden snores.’

  He grunted, dropping the cigarette he had been smoking into the long wet grass and retrieving his chewing gum from the side of his mouth. ‘Then maybe you should buy yourself some earplugs,’ he suggested drily, adding, ‘Have a nice chat with our killer, did you?’

  Kate made a face. ‘So you’ve heard?’

  ‘Along with most of the nick. Must be something that attracts psychos to you. I seem to remember that that last nutter, Twister, had quite a crush on you.’

  She bit back the response that flew to her lips. ‘Copely came to protest his innocence,’ she replied tightly. ‘He said he’d had nothing to do with any of the killings.’

  Roscoe nodded to the uniformed police officer standing by the door of the stable block and lifted a strip of yellow and black ‘Crime Scene. Do Not Cross’ tape to allow her to duck under it. Then he bent over to pull on a pair of protective booties he’d obviously stuffed in his pocket after coming outside for his smoke. ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ he said.

  She tugged a pair of similar booties out of her own pocket and leaned against one of the barn doors to slip them over her shoes. ‘He took a hell of a risk coming to my place like that, though,’ she pointed out. ‘Could be he was telling the truth.’

  Hauling open one of the double doors, the DI ushered her inside ahead of him. ‘In your dreams,’ he growled. ‘More likely he shot over here to do another one straight after seeing you.’

  There were four stalls to one side of the concrete passageway that ran from the door they had just used to another door at the far end of the block. Horses occupied three of the stalls but the end one appeared to be empty and two figures were bending down half in, half out of it – one suited and the other dressed in the familiar nylon overalls.

  As Kate reached the open door of the stall, she saw that the body was of a woman in her forties, with shoulder-length blonde hair and the sort of slender, perfectly proportioned body most women could only dream of. She was naked, except for a blue denim shirt that had been pulled up under her chin to expose her breasts, and the bulging eyes seemed to be turned down and fixed on the grotesque straw doll protruding from between her bloodstained teeth.

  ‘Ah, DS Lewis,’ Detective Superintendent Ansell murmured, straightening up from the corpse. ‘Recovered, I hope?’

  She swallowed and nodded. ‘More or less, thank you, sir,’ she replied.

  He gave her a zombie-like smile. ‘Well, that’s nice,’ he said, the sneer in his tone suggesting he thought otherwise, and he pivoted round to wave a hand at the corpse, which Lydia Summers was still carefully examining. ‘On the other hand, Mrs Haslar here is not quite so good, I’m afraid. A rather terminal condition, it seems.’ He emitted a theatrical sigh. ‘I don’t suppose Maurice Copely mentioned that he might be coming over here after he’d had his cosy little chat with you, did he?’

  Kate tensed but said nothing. His vicious sarcasm cut through her like a knife but she knew that Ansell was at his most dangerous when he was in this sort of mood and, despite the question he had asked, it was apparent that he was not expecting a reply.

  His dark eyes bored into her. ‘No, probably not,’ he went on, answering it himself, ‘but it was good of him to call by, wasn’t it? Pity you didn’t think to invite some of your colleagues to your little tête-à-tête, though, so we could all have a little chat. Then Mrs Haslar would have been able to look forward to riding again, Mr Haslar would not be in the state he is in at home and the unfortunate fourteen-year-old girl who came here this morning to saddle up her horse and found the body would not be under sedation.’

  Kate still made no comment. She had to admit that, after Copely’s vanishing trick the previous night, she was on a hiding to nothing – even though she bitterly resented her boss’s attitude and what she saw as a totally unjustified attack on her professional conduct. What would you have done in the same circumstances, Mr Bloody Perfect? she thought. Stayed in bed with the sheets pulled up over your head and dialled 999?

  She would have delighted in asking him that very question but, being honest with herself, she knew that she wasn’t ready to look for another job just yet, and then the opportunity was gone when he abruptly turned his back on her, as if she no longer existed, and engaged the pathologist in conversation. His arrogant and very public dismissal on top of the sarcasm to which she had been subjected was calculated to humiliate and it certainly succeeded. Kate’s hands clenched tightly by her sides and for a moment she simply stood there trying to control her involuntary trembling and hold back the tears. Roscoe scowled angrily. Tapping her on the arm, he caught her eye and nodded towards the door.

  ‘That was out of order,’ he said gruffly when they were outside, ‘and I shall tell the boss that later, you can bet your life on it.’

  ‘Thanks, Guv,’ she said, taking a deep breath and staring across the field at the jumble of parked vehicles. ‘But don’t go out on a limb for me. Maybe I should just jack all this in now and choose another career. Ansell has made it very plain throughout this investigation that he doesn’t think I’m up to it.’

  The DI glared at her. ‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ he growled. ‘He’s under a lot of pressure at the moment and it’s well known that he doesn’t like women officers anyway. Best thing you can do is to make yourself scarce until he calms down. Get on with some more inquiries. Re-interview Josh Turner and see if he’s holding anything back. See Copley’s old lady again – and Fallow’s too if she’s up to questions. Maybe they’ll say more to another woman than they would to a hairy-arsed DI like me.’

  Kate gave a pale smile, in spite of her downbeat mood. ‘Didn’t know you had a hairy arse, Guv?’ she said, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.

  He glared at her. ‘Beat it!’ he growled. ‘And thank your lucky stars you’re not likely to find out!’

  It had begun to drizzle through the mist as Kate made her way back to her car and, heading for Woolavington, she sniffed her disapproval at the rivulets forming, breaking and reforming under the scrape of her windscreen wipers – the weather in tune with her own downbeat mood.

  She had always considered herself to be fairly thick-skinned but Ansell seemed to be able to get to her
in a way no one else could. Perhaps it was due to the fact that he had been privy to her breakdown on the Twister inquiry two years before and that she was trying too hard to prove herself and demonstrate she was now fully recovered. On the other hand, maybe his rather effeminate leanings put him on the same feminine wavelength as her, which enabled him to sense where she was most vulnerable and use it to his advantage. Whatever the answer, she knew she wouldn’t be able to take much more of it and the sooner the case was over and he went back to headquarters the better as far as she was concerned. ‘Talk about team management,’ she muttered as she drove into Woolavington. ‘That arsehole couldn’t manage a piss-up in a brewery!’

  Lights flickered through the gloom in the windows of Copely’s bungalow when she finally pulled up outside, despite the fact that it was only mid-morning, and, predictably, the red MGA was conspicuous by its absence from the driveway. Pulling her coat up over her head, she ran the few yards to the front door, praying that Marion Copely would be at home and that the lights were not just left on as a security measure.

  She was in luck, however, and the dumpy dark-haired woman came to the door immediately, the expectant look on her tired face dying when she saw Kate.

  ‘DS Lewis,’ Kate began.

  ‘I remember who you are,’ Marion Copely replied. ‘I was hoping it was Maurice.’

  Kate made a face that registered her sympathy. ‘Can I have a few words?’ she asked.

  Marion Copely nodded and stepped to one side. ‘I haven’t seen him,’ she said as she led the way through to the living room and indicated a chair with a wave of her hand. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  Kate sat down on the edge of an armchair, waiting while the other settled on the edge of the settee opposite and smoothed her grey skirt with one trembling hand. ‘You told my DI and myself when we last called that you thought he was with – er – someone else,’ Kate said finally. ‘Have you any idea who that could be?’

  A short bitter laugh. ‘Anything in a skirt,’ Marion Copely replied, ‘preferably about eighteen to twenty.’

  ‘I assume he took his car when he left?’

  Another bitter laugh. ‘His pride and joy, you mean? He thinks more of that car than me.’ She shrugged. ‘Take a look around if you want but you won’t find him here.’