by Rebecca Tope
‘Well, no harm done,’ she said.
‘Not this time. The poor thing still can’t use her jaw properly. It takes her ages to eat her supper.’
Thea began to see herself through this woman’s eyes: attacker of dogs, careless driver, nuisance and intruder. Little wonder there was scarcely any light of friendship on her face. ‘How are the puppies?’ she asked, hoping to thaw the ice a little.
‘Gone. All but one, that is.’
‘Oh? You found homes for them, then?’ Thea tried to work this out. Helen had implied they were still only a week or two old when she’d been here before. If that was true, they couldn’t possibly have been of an age to go to new homes yet.
‘Actually no. Martin drowned them.’ The casually cruel image of rural folk was, of course, legendary, but Thea had often suspected it to be at odds with the reality. Some of those weeping farmers on the news during the foot and mouth catastrophe belied the image, for a start. On the other hand, non-productive livestock were culled without sentiment, and millions of beasts every year were slaughtered by conveyor-belt, shipped off from the farms without a second thought.
But drowning puppies was a new one on Thea. ‘Does Helen know?’ she asked, without due reflection.
‘Of course,’ Isabel Stacey shrugged. ‘Why not?’
There was no answer to that. Thea began to feel at a very bad disadvantage, with the Stacey woman giving no quarter. ‘You’ve been into our yard,’ she said. ‘What were you doing there?’
‘Looking for Martin or you, or Helen. I wanted to thank you for helping me – I’ve told you already.’
‘Why would Helen be here?’
‘Because she was here last time I passed this gate. She told me she comes here quite a lot.’
Isabel manifested impatience. With an easy flick of the wrist she unlatched the gate and ordered the collie through it. ‘Well, you’ve done what you came to do. I’ll tell Martin. And for your information, Helen Winstanley hardly ever comes here. She’s got practically nothing to do with us, these days. When are you leaving, anyhow?’ The last question was darted at Thea with a host of implications trailing from it.
‘End of next week.’
‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about, have you? Our funny little lives are going to carry on quite happily without you. You can forget all about us.’
Thea cracked. ‘Oh, yes. I can just forget two murders, a car accident, my dog’s ear being ripped by your bloody sheepdog, and a pseudo farm where God knows what’s going on behind locked doors.’
The last bit was foolish, as she realised the moment it was out of her mouth. As always when she lost control like this, she regretted it within seconds. Micro-seconds.
‘Hey! Hold on a minute. You’re not trying to make a connection between our perfectly normal business and the murders, are you? Because if you are, we’ll have you for slander by the end of tomorrow.’
‘I didn’t mean there was a connection.’ Thea’s voice was stiff. ‘I’m just listing the things it will be hard to forget.’
‘I’m sure you’ll manage, if you try hard enough.’
Unfriendliness on such a scale was rare, and Thea tried to rationalise it, as she walked back up the bridleway to the road. The woman obviously had things on her mind. She was anxious and irritable. Running home so fast at the sound of shouts and barks implied that she was afraid of some specific identifiable threat. Nothing to do with Thea personally. She’d just taken the brunt of a whole lot of unrelated stuff. And, she reminded herself, the woman’s husband had been perfectly affable, even kind. The fact that he was involved in something underhand, to which Helen Winstanley was party, didn’t necessarily connect him to the murders.
But, damn it, it certainly put him and his bad-tempered wife well and truly in the frame.
A car drew up beside her almost before she’d turned out into the road. Somebody’s got fast reactions, she thought, before she could see the driver or recognise the car.
‘Hi!’ It was Susanna, her red head leaning across the passenger seat, peering up in that awkward fashion that people in cars always had to adopt. Thea had to reorder her thoughts rapidly. Shouldn’t Susanna be angry with her? Wasn’t it much more to be expected that she would snap and snarl, rather than Isabel and her dog?
‘Oh, hello. How are you? What about your wrist? I didn’t think you’d be driving again so soon. And the car! I assumed it’d be a write-off.’
‘No, no. We’re both tough. I got my mate Nigel to hammer out the dent. He did it yesterday. Needs a new coat of paint, and then it’ll be fine.’
The point of impact was on the other side of the vehicle, and Thea wondered whether to go and inspect it. Somehow she was reluctant to do so. From her hazy recollections, there had been more than a ‘dent’ in Susanna’s motor.
‘I hope the insurance people will be able to work something out. It sounded quite complicated. Are you covered comprehensively?’
Susanna shrugged. ‘Leave it to them, I say. That’s what we pay them for. No hard feelings at all. Anyway, must dash. See you at the funeral?’
Oh, God, the funeral! ‘What time is it?’
‘Eleven, in the village church, then burial. Do come. We all want you to.’
It would be an even worse ordeal now than she’d originally supposed. She’d openly linked the Staceys with the murders, which would make it very hard to look them in the eye. And they might easily tell other people about the calumny, though presumably only if they were innocent and able to prove it beyond any doubt. But Joel’s friendly face floated before her, and her intimate connection with him, via his dead body, made it almost obligatory. She would learn more about him from the funeral, and she might achieve some sort of closure by watching him being laid in the ground.
And, of course, she might find it all too much to bear, with the reminders of her own husband’s funeral just a year before.
CHAPTER TWENTY
She did not want to spend the weekend in depressed isolation, but her options for company were limited. Harry, of course, would be her first choice. The comfortable but increasingly auspicious relationship was not something she wanted to abandon just yet. On the other hand, Helen Winstanley, who had initially seemed such a soulmate, was now tainted with suspicion and confusion. June and Lindy would be immersed in preparations for the funeral of their brother-in-law and uncle, and Thea held out no hope of a rapprochement with old Lionel, despite his being the neediest of all the people she had encountered.
And there was brother-in-law James, who might turn out for a visit if she pleaded with him. Somehow she did not relish that idea. She had parted from him a week ago feeling annoyance and frustration towards him. Some of those feelings persisted.
But she need not have worried. At nine thirty on Saturday morning, a police car drove through Brook View’s gate, and she instantly understood that Mohammed had come to the mountain. DS Hollis emerged from the rear of the car, plastered leg foremost. He stood on the gravel, finding his balance and looking all around. Thea went to meet him.
‘Nice morning,’ he said.
Thea recognised the young PC Herring as the driver of the car and entertained the notion that these two had some special relationship. The girl looked as bored as before, standing idly by while Hollis got on with whatever it was he’d come for.
‘Just a few things I’d like to check for myself,’ he said. ‘Would you walk round with me, in case I’ve got any questions?’
He was remarkably relaxed, she thought. ‘Your leg’s getting better then?’ she said.
‘Thank you. It’s more a case of getting used to it, I think.’
‘Where do you want to start?’
‘Underneath your window might be the best, and work out from there. I can’t help feeling we’ve missed something.’
‘Were you here? That first Sunday, I mean?’ She tried to remember all the comings and goings, the different faces of all the officials.
‘Oh, yes, but I didn’t
stay for long. The SOCOs were doing a good job, and I soon got the lie of the land.’
They stood where Thea and June had stood, a week earlier. The Saturdays seemed to be coming around with some rapidity. Only one more, and she’d be discharged from Brook View duties.
Hollis looked up, down, right, left, considering all the angles, listening to the background sounds. He limped to the field gate, inspecting the stone path closely. Thea wasn’t sure whether this was due to anxiety over slipping, or a search for missed clues.
‘Have you come across anything odd?’ he asked her.
She gave this some thought. ‘Well, only the pond. It’s gone a funny colour.’
Hollis looked over the gate towards the far corner of the field, and Thea thought she detected a small sigh.
‘No, not that one. The ornamental pond, down by the road. It has a little waterfall thing, but I turned it off. Your men might have missed it – it’s down behind those shrubs.’
Hollis appeared to consult some mental notes, looking into PC Herring’s face as he did so. She waited passively, like a well-trained nurse in the wake of the top consultant. Thea wondered how much of the detail of the murder Herring was party to. Could she supply names and times and connections, backing up the senior man’s memory?
‘I don’t remember anything about a pond.’
‘It’s down there, behind the rhododendrons,’ she repeated. ‘The land slopes towards the road.’
‘Show me, please.’
Thea led the way along the winding garden path, thinking that if it hadn’t been for Clive’s express instructions, and the annoying splashing, she might never have found it herself.
Hollis overtook her, the moment he saw their goal. He stood on the far side of the pond, his injured leg stuck out at an angle, obviously wondering how to proceed. ‘Let me help, sir,’ said Herring, trotting after him.
‘I need a sample,’ he said. ‘Can you scoop some of that red stuff out for me?’
Herring knelt on the grass and leant over the water. She gingerly scooped some of the red scum onto a fingertip and proffered it at Hollis. She made no suggestions as to what might have caused it.
He bent down and sniffed the girl’s finger, then touched it with his own. The intimacy was all incidental to the science. Thea felt a lurch inside her.
‘Good God – it’s not blood is it?’
‘Could well be,’ said Hollis. ‘Why didn’t the SOCO team find this, though?’
‘They’d probably not think to examine a garden pond,’ Thea said, realising at once that it was not her place to defend his forensic people. She carried on, just the same. ‘If it is Joel’s blood, I imagine it would have settled in the middle, under the water lily, for a day or two, before being dispersed to the edges, over the following days. Don’t you think? The waterfall was running the night Joel died. I turned it off on the Sunday morning. It makes quite a noise, you see.’
He looked at her slowly. ‘When did you first notice this?’
‘Oh – Tuesday, I think. Tuesday just gone, I mean. I thought it was odd, but it didn’t occur to me until now that it might be blood. Have I got it all wrong?’
‘Take a sample, Herring,’ the man ordered. Herring produced a small plastic pot, and filled it with the red stuff. ‘Let’s have a think,’ Hollis said. Thea was increasingly aware of him as a clever, unemotional but essentially approachable man. She no longer felt afraid of him, and wondered, with hindsight, just what that had been about.
‘Let’s say, then, that the murder happened here. The victim’s throat was cut, in or beside the pond, and much of the blood loss went into the water…all of it, possibly. He would then have to be carried down the field to the other pond, where the body was found.
‘How did they carry him? How long between being killed and the disposal of the body? The post-mortem showed he was left lying for some time before he was moved.’
Thea experienced a thrill at being party to this thinking aloud. It was like being taken backstage or onto the flight deck. She refrained from contributing any suggestions.
‘It explains most of the unanswered questions,’ he went on. ‘Why we couldn’t find any blood, in particular. And why you didn’t hear a struggle. This running water would have masked some sounds. If he screamed as the knife went across his throat, you wouldn’t have separated out a splash as he fell from the general splashing already going on. If he and his attacker had been speaking beforehand, you weren’t woken by it.’
‘If I’d gone outside to investigate, I would never have thought to come down here.’ She looked around her. ‘If they came in through the road gate, then along the fence, that would explain why the security lights didn’t go on. They probably never went near the house.’
‘They? Do you think Joel and his killer came in together, like friends?’
She put her hands up defensively. ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ she said. ‘I’m just guessing.’
He started to limp around the whole of the pond. In shape it was a long thin oval, the rocks and channels of the waterfall at one end, the red staining mostly accumulated at the other, perhaps ten feet away at most. ‘Just big enough for a body to lie in,’ Hollis mused. ‘But then quite a job to fish him out again and move him to the field.’
‘One person couldn’t do it, sir,’ said Herring. ‘There’s a liner, look. They’re dreadfully slippery. You can’t get a purchase on them.’
‘So let’s assume he was left on the grass, with his head in the water, so he could bleed discreetly, and not leave any marks. Then they arranged him in much the same way down in the far pond.’
The implication of a multiplicity of killers made Thea feel suddenly vulnerable. ‘Do you think there was more than one?’
‘No reason to think it was the work of just one person. Never make assumptions,’ he told her. As he talked, he was staring at the ground, searching, she supposed, for flattened grass or drops of blood.
‘They might have used the wheelbarrow,’ Thea said, on a whim. ‘It’s a good big one.’
‘Show me.’
She led the way back to the yard, passing the front of the house. Hollis limped awkwardly, with no regular rhythm. The barrow stood upended against the wall of the barn, where it had been when she first arrived two weeks before. ‘Herring,’ said Hollis, with a flick of the head. The police officer took thin plastic gloves from a pocket, pulled them on, and lightly grasped the handles. She set the barrow down, and all three gazed at it.
There were smudges of mud up the sides, but no more than that. A dead body would have overflowed, arms and legs dangling over the sides, but it was certainly sturdy enough for the task. ‘Could they have got it over the field?’ Hollis wondered. ‘Is it very pitted?’
‘Not really,’ Thea said. ‘And there are little paths across it, that the sheep have made.’ She expected him to go and look, but he made no move.
‘We’ll have to take this for examination,’ he said, looking dubiously at the barrow. It wouldn’t go into the police car, as they all quickly realised. ‘Or maybe I’ll send someone out to collect it.’
‘I can check it for prints now, sir,’ offered Herring. Hollis nodded.
‘Well, this looks like progress,’ said Thea, feeling rather chirpy. ‘Wouldn’t it be splendid if you got the murderer’s fingerprints!’
‘It would be incredible,’ he said, with none of her optimism. ‘But I agree we’ve found a few more pieces of the puzzle.’ Then he scowled. ‘No thanks to that bloody SOCO team.’
‘Shall I make some coffee?’ she asked, feeling they’d concluded the main purpose of his visit.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
In the kitchen, making coffee for Hollis, while Herring stayed outside with the wheelbarrow, another belated memory came to her. ‘Oh, I ought to tell you about the cloth we found,’ she said, handing him the coffee, and trying to make him sit at the table. ‘In the field.’
She described it as best she could, and he listened
closely. ‘Sounds like a barrel cleaner,’ he said. ‘For a gun. You drop the lead weight down the barrel and pull it through. Did it smell of cleaning fluid?’
‘It didn’t smell of anything. It must have been outside for ages. It was stiff with mud. I think someone had tried to hide it in the hedge.’
‘Would your dog have taken it to play with? After you brought it indoors, I mean?’
‘She might, but I put it out of her reach. And the labs don’t jump up – they’re too well trained. I can’t think where it’s gone.’
‘Have there been any people here since you found it?’
Thea tried to recapture the sequence of events for the past five days, with considerable difficulty. ‘Oh, yes, lots. I had a bit of a car accident, which threw everything for a while…’
‘Yes, we heard about that.’
‘I suppose you would have done. Anyway, Martin Stacey brought me home and stayed with me for a bit. Then there was a District Nurse who turned up to check that I wasn’t concussed or anything. Then Harry Richmond popped in. I think that’s everybody.’ She paused. ‘Except Helen Winstanley, who was only here a little while on the day of the accident.’ She caught herself, and devoted a few seconds to wondering just why she’d added this final nugget. She had betrayed Helen with those few words, wantonly revealed something that the woman would almost certainly wish to be kept secret. It was the mere presence of the police, she realised. Burly male shoulders inviting her to unburden herself. James had long ago convinced her that the police were in fact not stupid. They operated under major handicaps a lot of the time. They were slow and methodical and patient. That made them come across as bovine, very often. But they were also careful and attentive and trustworthy.
Thea had never been seriously let down by a man, never been attacked or frightened by one, either. She obeyed the law because she saw no reason not to, and the benefits of a clear conscience were indisputable. So, despite a certain impatience and even occasional scorn towards the police, she was merely following a built-in injunction to tell them as much of the truth as she could muster, when asked a direct question.