by Ann Cleeves
‘The name doesn’t mean anything.’ Becky had turned back to face the window. Outside an old apple tree was in blossom, the flowers the colour of candy floss. ‘But. as I said, Patrick didn’t talk to me about it.’
‘Do you know if the Randle family had any connection with Northumberland? Did the county have a special meaning for him?’ Holly thought the man could have come north to continue his research. ‘We still don’t know why he chose to come to the area.’
‘Well, it wasn’t to see me.’ Becky stood up. ‘I thought I might phone him, you know. After I got that text from him. I was going to offer to meet up. I kept planning the words in my head. We’re only forty miles apart. Let’s get together for a drink. In Newcastle maybe. That’s kind of halfway. But in the end I decided against it. I thought I had to let him come back to me when he was ready. And that’s what’s really hurting. I could have seen him, changed things. He might even still be alive. It’s not just grief that’s kept me awake since I heard he’d died.’ She paused and looked directly at Holly. ‘I feel so bloody guilty.’
Chapter Twenty
Vera sat in her office and brooded. Joe had come back from the prison with news of his conversation with Lizzie Redhead. He’d achieved precious little and she thought that she should have gone instead. Joe was at the time in his life when his judgement could be clouded by a bonny lass. The only useful information he could offer was that the woman from the prisoners’ aid charity had visited too. What was that about? Lizzie would have plenty of support on the outside and a home to go back to. Vera thought there were people who needed Shirley Hewarth’s help more than Lizzie Redhead.
A wasp was buzzing against the glass of the window. Vera opened it, letting in a sudden roar of traffic noise, and set the insect free. Wasn’t it too early in the year for wasps? She stood up, grabbed her bag and went out. In the car park she passed Holly and was tempted to stop and ask how she’d got on with Patrick’s girlfriend, but in the end she only waved and drove away. She felt she was being sucked back to the valley where the bodies had been discovered. As if it was a vacuum and there was no resistance.
The place was quiet. It was about the same time of day as when she’d first visited in response to the discovery of Patrick’s body. That had been two days ago, and they still hadn’t found the place where he’d been killed, though the search team had been working from dawn until almost dusk over the past two days. Costing a bloody fortune in overtime. They’d finished for the evening and Vera drove past the entrance to the Carswells’ house, the house that the locals called ‘the Hall’. Percy’s Mini was parked outside the bungalow, but here too everything was quiet. As she approached the front door there was the faint murmur of the television. She rang the bell and heard the sound of it inside. It took a while for anyone to answer and Vera thought that Susan must be out. Percy’s daughter was so curious that she’d have the door open immediately.
The old man looked a little dishevelled and she thought he must have fallen asleep in front of the TV.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ He stood aside to let her in.
‘Your Susan not around?’
‘She’s gone into Kimmerston to see some friends. Regular date, once a month.’
‘Ah well,’ Vera said. ‘It was you I wanted to see anyway.’
He took her into the living room and switched of the television. ‘Just rubbish anyway.’ Then he offered her tea.
‘You’re all right,’ Vera said. ‘I’m awash with the stuff. I’m not sure what I’m here for really. Only a chat, and to get out of the office.’ She sat in an armchair by the window and waited for him to take his place. ‘Do you have much to do with the folk up at Valley Farm?’
It took him a while to gather his thoughts. She thought he’d probably been to The Lamb for a couple of pints, then eaten a big supper. He’d have been fast asleep within minutes of his daughter leaving, the doorbell jolting him awake, leaving him a bit confused and dazed.
‘I see them around.’ She thought he had been to the pub, because he was dressed in proper trousers and a shirt, a grey cardigan, just as he had been when they’d first met. ‘They seem decent enough. I’ve known Sam Redhead all his life, of course. He grew up on the estate farm. He’s always been a quiet kind of chap.’
‘Did you ever meet their daughter?’
He shook his head. ‘I heard stories. It’s hard being a parent. You have to stick by them, even if you don’t always like the way they carry on.’
There was a moment of silence. ‘Does Susan clean for all of them?’
‘Aye. Mrs Carswell recommended her to the Prof. and his wife, and then the other houses took her on.’
‘Handy.’
He nodded. Vera waited. ‘She likes some of them better than others. The Prof. can be a bit particular. He doesn’t like her moving the stuff on his shelves, then complains because there’s a bit of dust left.’ Another pause. ‘He’s a proper writer. He’s had real books published. Not fiction. Historical stuff.’
‘What about Janet? His wife?’
‘Susan says she’s a bit of a doormat. It’s almost as if she’s scared of him.’ He looked up. ‘But you don’t want to take too much notice of what Susan says. She’s never been one to let the truth stand in the way of a good story.’ He gave an awkward little laugh. ‘I tell her she should be a writer herself.’
Vera smiled too. ‘You must remember the farmhouse up there when it was still working. The place where the Lucas family lives now.’
‘I used to work there. Contract mostly. And my dad before me. He was a moudy man.’
Vera grinned. ‘Eh, I haven’t heard that word for years! You’d get in the moudy man to clear your land of moles and pests.’
Percy nodded. ‘You wouldn’t recognize the house now. It’s all been tarted up. You’d never guess it was ever a working farm.’ A pause. ‘A chap called Heslop used to be the tenant farmer. Spent all his adult life there, struggling to make a living from the place. He only gave up when his wife couldn’t stand it any more and forced him to shift to the town. He died six months later. He’d be turning in his grave if he could see what they’d done to the place.’
‘You’ve been inside?’
‘Nigel Lucas had a party last Christmas and invited most of the village.’ He gave a wicked grin. ‘I think they were hoping the Carswells would show, but the major and his wife were down south visiting their daughter. So Nigel had to make do with the plebs.’
‘He’s a bit of a social climber, is he?’
‘Cash is no object,’ Percy said. ‘Susan says their kitchen cost more than a man’s wage for a year. But I don’t think that’s enough for Nigel. He’d like to get in with the county set. It’ll never happen, though. Round here you need to be born to it.’
‘How did he make all his money?’ Vera leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. She thought this was as happy as she got, digging around into the background of her suspects. Perhaps she was a bit of a historian too.
‘He had his own business. Burglar alarms. That sort of thing, I suppose. Sold it and made a fortune, apparently.’ Percy paused again. ‘Susan says he’s been accepted as a magistrate. She saw the letter when she was cleaning last week.’
Vera thought that figured. Nigel would see it as a first step to becoming established in the county. Besides, he’d love sitting on the bench and passing judgement on more lowly mortals. ‘What does Susan think of the wife? She seems a bonny thing. Younger than him?’
Percy considered. ‘She’s not that much younger. Not according to Susan. Well preserved.’
Vera thought Susan would probably know. She imagined the cleaner going through desk drawers when she had the place to herself, picking up birth dates and stray personal details. She’d be one to hoard information, loving it for its own sake. And isn’t that just what I do?
She looked across at Percy. ‘Did Susan pick up any useful facts about Patrick Randle, the house-sitter? She’d have been curious – a new man in the vall
ey – but she might be a bit embarrassed to tell us, because she wasn’t supposed to go up into the flat. She wouldn’t want us to know she’d been prying. But she might have told you.’
For the first time Percy seemed uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair. ‘She means no harm.’
‘That’s not really an answer, is it, pet?’
The old man didn’t reply and Vera continued, ‘You know this place. Two men are dead. You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if you had any idea what might have caused it? Even if you only suspected?’
‘I don’t know anything about the murders,’ Percy said. ‘Really. I hate all this. The police in the meadow and the roadblock at the end of the lane, so I get stopped every time I just want a quick pint in The Lamb. If I knew owt useful, I’d tell you. I want everything back to normal.’
Vera nodded, satisfied at last.
She expected to find the station quiet, but Holly was still there. With a touch of guilt Vera suspected the officer had been waiting for her. If it’d been Joe, Vera would have taken him home, fed him something her hippy neighbours had left in her freezer, opened a beer. But she’d learned that Holly disliked that sort of approach, saw it almost as corrupting. So Vera took her to the canteen, bought coffee from one of the machines. That was about as informal as Holly was comfortable with. Their words seemed to rattle around the empty space.
‘So, Hol? How did you get on with Randle’s girlfriend?
‘She’d seen about the murder in the press. Of course she was upset. Although Becky was the one to end the relationship, I don’t think she saw the separation as permanent. She always thought there’d be a happy-ever-after ending.’
Vera heard the sarcasm, but ignored it. Holly could do with a bit of romance in her life. It might make her a tad less brittle.
‘If she still cared for the lad, why did she dump him?’
‘Because she thought he was keeping secrets from her. Maybe she thought if she threatened to dump him, it would jolt him into confiding in her. It didn’t work, though.’
Vera became more alert at that. Until then she’d been going through the motions, letting Holly know that she was taking her seriously. But now this was starting to get interesting. ‘Come on, Hol. Tell me more. What sort of secrets. Another woman?’
‘Nothing like that. At least I don’t think so. Apparently Patrick’s personality changed at about the time his mother took up with her new man. He became interested in the family history and started researching the past, digging around in the archives of the local paper. He got a bit paranoid about his university research too, talked about people stealing his data. I’m not sure what it was all about. But he sent Becky a text last week.’ Holly looked down at her notes. ‘Nearly fit to be your friend again. If you can forgive me. Which Becky took to mean that he’d finished whatever project had been taking up all his time, and he hoped it might be possible for them to get back together. That he might be prepared to tell her what had been going on.’
‘Did she reply?’ Vera’s coffee had been left to go cold.
‘She didn’t phone him. I’m not sure whether she texted.’
Vera tried to get her head around this. Of course the emotional affairs of two young people might have no relevance at all to the case, but Patrick’s obsession with secrecy struck her as significant. What could a young man from his background possibly have to hide? And where could Martin Benton fit in? She realized that it was starting to get dark outside.
‘Get on home.’ She made a little shooing gesture with her hands. ‘We’ve got a full day tomorrow and I can’t have you off your game. You’ve done brilliantly, Hol. Thanks.’ Then she smiled at the young woman’s confusion. It never did any harm to wrong-foot the team by giving a bit of praise. It occurred to Vera, watching Holly walk away to spend the night alone in her flat, that they had more in common than she liked to admit. She’d been spiky and defensive when she’d been a young officer, and though there were more women in the service now, Holly didn’t have it easy. No family around to support her. And it probably wasn’t her fault that she looked like something out of a fashion magazine, with legs up to her waist and American teeth. Holly left the canteen and Vera watched with a stab of sympathy. Then she thought she must be getting soft in her old age.
On the way back to her car she called into her office. On her desk was the brown Manila file she’d seen in Randle’s car and a little note from Joe: This is the file you were asking about. It was empty. No fingerprints except Randle’s. She thought that just about summed up the progress they were making with the case.
The next morning she woke very early. There was the cold grey light of just after dawn, but it was the noise of her phone that had dragged her from sleep. The landline. Everyone knew that her house had crap mobile reception. ‘Yes!’ She could feel the adrenaline racing through her heart, jolting her, scattering weird ideas in her brain. She thought she must sound as Percy had, when she’d rung his doorbell the afternoon before.
It was a voice she didn’t recognize and it took her a while to take in the words. ‘We think we’ve found the locus for the young man’s death.’
‘Where?’ Now she was fully conscious and aware of what was going on. She was already out of bed, the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder, scrabbling to find a scrap of paper.
‘The vegetable garden of the big house. We didn’t look there yesterday and it was our first search this morning. There’s blood on the wooden rim of one of the seedbeds. Easy enough to miss, but one of my boys picked it up. I’ll bet you anything we’ll find that the soil on the victim’s shoes has traces of compost. There’s salad stuff growing in there, and some of the plants have been crushed.’
‘Thanks.’ Her mind was still racing and that had nothing to do with being wakened suddenly from a deep sleep. If Randle had been killed in the garden, why bother moving him? He’d be just as much hidden there as he’d been in the ditch. Then the thought came, sudden and urgent: It would help if we knew which of the victims died first. She realized the officer in charge of the search team was still on the end of the line. ‘Tell your people it’s my shout next time I see them in the pub.’
‘We’ll carry on looking. But I thought you’d want to know.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Friday morning and Annie Redhead was counting the hours until her daughter’s release from prison. They’d had a phone call from Lizzie and had been told she’d be let out of the gaol mid-morning on Sunday. Phone calls were always tricky. The background noise and the money running out, people in the queue shouting for her to be quick. Annie had offered to pick Lizzie up: ‘If that’s all right. If you haven’t made any other plans.’ She’d become used to being careful what she said to Lizzie; always felt it was important not to make assumptions. After all, Lizzie was an adult now. She had to be allowed to make her own decisions. Annie imagined standing in the gloomy prison hall where she waited when she went to visit and seeing the small figure of Lizzie being led along the corridor. Looking like a shadow. In her daydream Lizzie was always delighted to see her and, when she emerged into the hall, lit up through the Victorian stained-glass windows, her face seemed to be shining.
Annie wasn’t sure whether she was looking forward to Lizzie’s release or dreading it. She’d left behind the social embarrassment of Lizzie’s imprisonment months ago. That no longer worried her. The court case had been in the papers and everyone had known about it. The only time Sam ever said anything positive about selling the restaurant was that he was glad they weren’t living in Kimmerston when the news came out. ‘I couldn’t bear it. Customers talking about it and falling quiet every time we got close. The pity.’
Of course their friends in Valley Farm had known that Lizzie was inside, that she’d been charged with grievous bodily harm, but they’d never really mentioned it. Not in front of Sam. They understood that he was a private man. Jan and Lorraine had come to her separately, saying much the same thing: ‘I’m really sorry. It must be a dreadfu
l time for you. If ever you want to talk . . .’ But the last thing Annie wanted to talk about was Lizzie’s behaviour. She was happy to have everyone there when she needed some company, people to share a bottle of wine with, a bit of a party on a Friday night. Even Sam had appreciated that. But she didn’t want a heavy conversation or advice. They’d been through all that since Lizzie was tiny – with teachers, psychologists and social workers. None of it had helped. She thought Lizzie was damaged in some way, had been since she was a baby, and nobody could help her.
Occasionally Annie saw a mother with a grown-up daughter walking through the town. They’d have linked arms or be sharing a joke. Then she experienced a moment of intense jealousy, just as she supposed women who couldn’t have children felt when they saw a newborn in a pram. The pain of wanting something that would probably always be denied to them.
The great thing about having Lizzie in prison had been that they could stop worrying about her for a while. The relief of that had been immense. Like the bliss of chronic pain suddenly disappearing. Annie knew about chronic pain because of the arthritis in her knees. In prison their daughter was the authorities’ responsibility. Annie could go to bed at night knowing that Lizzie was safe, that there would be no frantic phone calls in the early hours demanding action. No mad dashes to A&E. But soon Lizzie would be out, and Annie’s deepest fear was that the stress and anxiety would return and they wouldn’t be able to handle them this time. They were too old. They’d become used to contentment, a wonderful boredom, and a return to the old way of surviving might break them.
The phone rang again just after Sam had driven away on his routine trip to the village to collect his paper.
‘Hello.’ Annie hadn’t recognized the number and her voice was sharp. It would be someone trying to sell insurance, a new boiler, loft insulation.