by Paul Finch
‘You mean by her kids?’
‘Up to now I’ve been working on the basis these accidental deaths are like practical jokes; a bit of a giggle that some nutcase is having with us.’
‘And that ties in with the Thornton kids, how?’
Heck described the textbooks he’d seen in Tilly Thornton’s apartment. ‘She seems inordinately interested in this eighteenth-century gang, the Mohocks. A bunch of practical jokers who literally knocked ’em dead. Played fatal pranks on people, just for a lark.’
‘So she’s studying evil as part of a religious course.’ Fisher sounded unimpressed. ‘Doesn’t that go with the territory?’
‘Okay. But then there’s the Harold Lansing and Mervin Thornton link. Both are on the list of victims and both were known to Tilly. Then we’ve got Dean Torbert, who might have been known to her. Like you said, that’s all quite a coincidence.’
‘Oh – on the subject of coincidences, there’s been another strange accidental death down in Surrey today. Only heard it on the wire about ten minutes ago.’
‘Specifically where?’
‘Place called Shawcross Spinney, private hunting estate.’
‘Please tell me it’s as simple as some plummy-voiced prat shooting his own foot off?’
‘If it was that straightforward I wouldn’t bother you with it, pal. But it was that poacher you locked up five days ago.’
‘Vinnie Budd?’ Heck almost lost control of the car. ‘How did it happen?’
‘Seems he caught his hand in one of his own traps, and tried to hack it off with a knife.’
‘What? Tried to hack his own hand off? No one’d do that, would they!’
‘Depends on his mental state, doesn’t it? If he was ill, or something … anyway, ended up butchering himself in the process. The local big nob’s gamekeepers found him around midday. Well dead by that time. Cause was given as heart failure caused by rapid blood loss.’
Heck gave no immediate response. Fleetingly, all he could think about was Tilly Thornton being called back to her family farm yesterday.
Something urgent had come up.
‘So what do you think?’ Fisher asked.
‘I still need more, Eric. A lot more.’
‘There’s not much more you can do at this time of night. Or me.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘So what’s what’s-her-name doing?’
Heck got his foot down, accelerating along the motorway from 80 to 100. ‘Gail’s busy. But I’m going to need to speak to her pronto, so you’d better clear the line.’
‘Suits me,’ Fisher said, yawning. ‘Speak to you tomorrow.’
When Fisher had rung off Heck checked his messages, but found nothing from Gail. He hadn’t really expected anything. She was doubtless still up to her neck in in-house controversy. He called her anyway, but found that he had to leave a voicemail.
‘Gail, this is Heck,’ he said. ‘A lot of stuff’s happened in the last couple of hours. I know it’s late, but I very much want to have a chat with Charles Thornton, so I’m on my way over there again now. Call me as soon as you can.’
Chapter 31
Even though it was now several hours since she’d first arrested Pavey, Gail’s legs were still shaking. She went tiredly back into the CID office, cup of coffee in hand, and slumped at her desk, barely noticing what time it was.
‘You need to think about this very carefully,’ Will Royton had warned her in his private office, after he’d first arrived back at the nick – not because he was such a dinosaur that he couldn’t tolerate the sight of a fellow copper under arrest, but because he knew there were many others in the job who were, and he wanted to lay it on the line for her before they proceeded to involve the IPCC. ‘He’s already shouting back there that this is vindictiveness on your part. That you’re his ex, that you couldn’t take it when he broke up with you and that you’ve been looking for any way you can to stick it to him.’
Hot-faced, Gail had denied this, but at the same time had explained as best she could about her actual relationship with Ron Pavey. Royton had turned pale as he’d listened to the full gory details, but at least had done her the courtesy of not interrupting. She still wasn’t sure whether his apparent immediate acceptance of this story should be a relief to her or a slight.
‘In a way, that makes it even worse,’ he’d replied. ‘If all that stuff comes out, and it will – Pavey will make damn sure it does, if for no other reason than to ruin your standing in this department – they’ll think it even more likely that you’re a woman scorned. They’re also going to question your moral fibre. They’re going to say that you put up with this so-called abuse for months and months without raising a complaint. They’ll say that you’re disingenuous and dishonest, or at best that you lack strength and character. They’ll say that it was only later on – when you got this new fella in your life, another seasoned DS with a streetwise reputation – that you felt sufficiently empowered to launch a revenge attack.’
Gail had wanted so much to take issue with that. To respond with outrage, insisting that Heck wasn’t her ‘new fella’, yet only twenty-four hours ago, very ill-advisedly it now seemed, she’d been in bed with him. It had been nothing – a quickie, a bit of stress-relieving nookie – but it seemed there was always a price to pay for such lapses of personal dignity.
‘Either way, Gail, Pavey’s defence will have a field day,’ Royton had added. ‘They’ll put you through the eye of a needle.’
‘Sir, I’m a police officer. That means I’m a professional witness. I can take it.’
‘Okay, fair enough. But there’s something else too. Mark Heckenburg will already realise this, but I want to make sure you do as well. You know how difficult it is to prove conspiracy to commit murder. And that’s on a good day. Unless Pavey cracks, which is highly unlikely, your entire case against him is going to hinge on the word of a toerag called Alan Devlin. Do you think he’s going to stand up to this level of scrutiny?’
She couldn’t give any kind of honest answer to that.
‘I mean what if he doesn’t?’ Royton had asked. ‘Then the wheels are really going to come off. If Pavey walks, how bad is it going to look? It won’t just be a matter of getting ostracised by a few pig-headed idiots who’ve never joined the twenty-first century. There’ll be no future for you on this division, maybe not in this force, maybe not in the job … if nothing else, you can forget that long line of promotion boards that I know you were hoping for.’
‘Sir, if we turned a blind eye to every crime we were confronted with, just because it looked like it might go belly-up in court, we’d have no credibility as coppers. Not to the general public, and not to ourselves. And you know that.’
He’d nodded soberly. ‘I do. Of course I do. But I just want to be sure that you understand what you’re getting into, Gail. This is a potential world of crap. It really is. But for what it’s worth, I have no doubt that Ron Pavey is a controlling shithouse who has no interests other than his own. I’ve never liked him. You send him to jail, and you’ll be doing us all a favour. But the odds are against it.’
Gail now sat alone in the otherwise empty CID office, feeling more drained – both physically and emotionally – than she could ever remember. Beyond the windows, as always on late shifts, the opaque blackness of night seemed to fit against the panes like something tangible and solid, blotting out the world beyond. At least her part in the investigation was largely done. CPS advisers would be arriving shortly, to assess the case. Professional Standards were already interviewing Pavey. On the subject of which, they’d also mentioned something about wanting to speak to Heck.
She glanced around distractedly, wondering exactly where he might be. It seemed unlikely he’d have signed off and hit the sack without coming back to the nick first and seeing what was happening. She surveyed her desk, wondering if he’d perhaps left her a written note – and her eyes alighted on a neat but large stack of freshly printed paperwork filling her
in-tray. The sight of it would have been depressing at the best of times, but now it might as well have been a pile of boulders she somehow had to shift. She picked idly at the top sheet, wondering what it was. Her interest was briefly – but only briefly – kindled when she recognised it as a complete listing, including names, addresses, dates of birth, occupations and so forth, of the county’s licensed firearms owners. She’d requested this herself of course, but ultimately it lowered her spirits even more, because while this was the work she was supposed to be engaged in at present, she’d become so distracted by other events that she’d almost completely lost track, not to mention her enthusiasm. Okay, so somebody had shot down the blimp that had killed Gus Donaldson; seriously – could that really have anything to do with Harold Lansing’s death? Heck had crashed his own car into a river after being mischievously led onto a flimsy bridge; but that had had nothing to do with Lansing, and surely proved how easily these curious incidents could fall into a false pattern.
She sipped her coffee, which was lukewarm and basically yuk, as she flipped through a few more sheets, her eyes focusing on little more than a mass of meaningless text.
Until she saw the name ‘Thornton’.
She replaced her coffee on the desk and looked more closely at it.
Mervin Thornton, of Thornton Farm, Woldingham, had applied …
Wasn’t that the same address where Heck had suffered his accident?
Gail sat stiffly upright. All sense of torpor fell slowly away from her.
Thornton Farm.
But hold on – wasn’t Mervin Thornton also a casualty? Wasn’t he the one who’d managed to blow himself up like a football, pumping himself full of compressed gas?
Her neck hairs still tingled as she examined the document. Not only had Mervin Thornton held a firearms licence, but he’d been a regular at various gun clubs – and was the owner of a Remington 597 Long Rifle.
Of course, if Thornton was already dead it kind of discounted him from the enquiry, except that there was nothing to physically prevent the transfer of this rifle into someone else’s possession.
Didn’t Mervin Thornton have two grown-up children?
And weren’t she and Heck looking for two killers?
But where the hell was Heck now?
With sudden urgency Gail dug her mobile from her pocket and found a single message waiting. She played it back and, with an air of near-inevitability, listened to the voice of her partner as he told her how things were moving on apace and that he was on his way, right now, to the Thornton farm. She bashed in his number.
There was no response. She tried again, but still there was no response.
Heck shoved the lifeless mobile into the glove box, climbed from the Mazda, and locked its door behind him.
The farmhouse stood in darkness, which was hardly surprising given that it was now somewhere between two and three in the morning, though there was a faint ambient glow from beyond its steeply tilted roof, indicating that lights were still on in various of the outbuildings. But the initial thing that caught his attention was his Peugeot, sitting some twenty yards to his right, battered, crumpled, and reeking of mud and algae.
He approached the vehicle glumly. It was a write-off for sure. But in managing to drag it from the river, Charles Thornton had been as good as his word. Heck felt a brief pang of uncertainty, not to mention guilt, as he wondered if this was the reason why the head of the Thornton clan had been so keen for his sister to pop back home and help.
Heck turned to the house, wondering if he should leave this latest question-and-answer session until the morning – and was surprised to see the front door open and a ghostly figure standing there. It was Freda Thornton, wearing a floor-length white nightgown and a white woollen shawl, the two ends of which she clasped to her breast. She regarded him with her usual cold but lifeless intensity.
‘Hello, Mrs Thornton,’ Heck said, approaching. ‘Really sorry I’ve disturbed you. Truth is I only dropped by on the off-chance you folks might still be up. Bit naughty of me, I suppose. Should’ve realised you wouldn’t be. Thing is, I was looking to enquire about my vehicle, which I can see your son has very kindly recovered. Also, I need to take a statement from Charles about the incident at the old bridge. The person responsible has been arrested, you see, and is in the process of being prosecuted.’
The way her mouth crooked into an abrupt, V-shaped smile was more than a little disconcerting, not least because it was the first display of any emotion he’d seen from the woman, but secondly because there was no apparent reason for it.
‘You can speak to Charles if you wish,’ she said in a distant tone, which didn’t at all seem to match her curious grin.
‘I won’t be disturbing him?’
‘It’s no trouble at all.’
Something about her easy compliance at two o’clock in the morning made Heck wary. ‘Well … I don’t think he’ll want to be giving me a statement at this hour.’
She ignored that, pointing to the corner of the house. ‘He and Tilly are round the back. You’ll find them in the main barn.’
‘Oh – well, I suppose that’s different. I mean, if they’re actually up and about. Unless they’re doing something important, of course?’
‘It’s nothing important.’ She continued to smile.
Okay, she’d been weird before. But this was really weird. Hardcore play-acting if ever he’d seen it.
‘Is someone in there with you?’ Heck asked, trying to look over her shoulder.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she replied, still smiling.
‘Are you okay?’
Only now did her smile falter. ‘Of course I’m okay. Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘Mrs Thornton – is there anything you perhaps want to tell me? I mean while there’s just me and you.’
She maintained her forced smile, but her eyes widened at this – as though alarmed. ‘I thought you came here to see Charles?’
‘Well … technically I did.’
‘Then technically you’ll find him in the barn, Sergeant. Now please go. It’s most rude of you to have called at this hour!’ She stepped back and banged the door closed – a little unnecessarily, Heck thought.
He remained on the step for a few seconds, wondering why he felt as if he was under surveillance. Slowly, cautiously, he moved towards the corner of the house, glancing up at its blank, black windows as he did. He was uncomfortably conscious that he had neither a radio nor a working telephone with him. The only thing he did have, when he rummaged in his jeans pocket, was his grey-and-white chequered handkerchief; the one he’d offered to Gail in the London bed and breakfast. It seemed a ridiculous thing to do, but he wadded it into a ball and, just before turning the corner, dropped it alongside the path.
As he’d seen the first time he’d visited here, the farmhouse was a large, ungainly structure, which appeared to have been built and rebuilt over several centuries, as a direct result of which it now comprised numerous wings and annexes. He turned one corner after another, crossing various small yards, before spying an open doorway from which lamplight issued. This wasn’t connected to the main house, but gave entry to a very large freestanding structure built from timber, breeze blocks, and corrugated metal.
‘Your basic main barn,’ he said under his breath.
When he entered, he saw flattened straw on the ground and bare electric bulbs dangling overhead, but it wasn’t the vast, church-like space he’d expected. The barn’s interior appeared to have been compartmentalised by wooden-slatted dividing walls. This first area was being used as a garage. On the far side of it there was another door, this one large enough to admit two cars side by side, though at present a heavy steel shutter had been pulled down on it. There was only one vehicle inside.
Heck approached it in near-reverential silence.
It was a Land Rover, metallic green in colour.
As he circled round it, memories were stirred of the iron bridge over the River Mole, and th
e wooded lane near Harold Lansing’s house. He peered through its tinted windows. Of course, there was nothing on view that was even vaguely incriminating.
Then he heard a voice somewhere else in the barn. At first he wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from; this big, echoing structure, subdivided with God knew how many partition walls, was likely to possess some odd acoustics. Even so, there was something about the voice that wasn’t quite right. It was high-pitched and quavering. It said: ‘I’ve brought you some hardboiled eggs and some nuts.’
A deeper voice responded with something unintelligible, and a chuckle. Heck thought the latter voice might belong to Charles Thornton.
After that, there was silence.
On the other side of the garage, another narrow doorway stood open. Heck glanced through it and down a long, straw-filled corridor again lit by hanging electric bulbs. Along the timber-slatted walls hung a variety of farming tools and other accoutrements: hoes, forks, ravels of rubber tubing and so forth, though midway along there was a row of eight hooks, from each one of which was suspended what looked like a set of grey overalls.
Heck walked slowly down there and stopped in front of them. Two of them were spattered with dried reddish-brown fluid. It might be wood-stain, though on the other hand … He was determined not to jump to conclusions about what he was viewing here. He couldn’t afford to. Nothing he’d seen thus far would lack for a reasonable explanation. What did a green Land Rover and some dirty overalls prove except that he was out in the country? When he fancied something rustled on the other side of the wall on which the garments hung, he peeked through the gap between the slats, but saw nothing except another dim-lit passage, and beyond the slats on the far side of that an area of total darkness. This place was like a rabbit warren.
‘Why don’t you do something to help me?’ came the voice of Charles Thornton. At least, it had sounded like Charles. As before, it wasn’t possible to trace the direction.
A tittering laugh followed.
Heck pivoted in a full circle, feeling confused and disoriented. He wondered if maybe Charles and Tilly were outside, and he’d heard them through an open window. He moved on to the end of the passage, only to find that it turned ninety degrees into another passage that was almost identical, though in this case there were two doors on the left, spaced about fifteen yards apart. He moved to the first and glanced through into what looked like another spacious vehicle bay, though this was occupied by some immense, mud-caked farming contraption, on the other side of which he could just about distinguish another wide doorway with a steel shutter.