Skelgill nods once, his features inscrutable. He had, rather covertly, sent a brief text message during their journey. He did not mention its purpose and there was apparently no reply. Perhaps this exchange provides the explanation. DS Jones follows him, looking somewhat perplexed; a sight that draws a knowing grin from Veronica as she turns her charms upon some newly arrived prey.
*
‘It’s funny, Guv – how in the local dialect yat means gate.’
Nose in pint, Skelgill raises a mildly interested eyebrow. Encouraged, DS Jones continues to muse.
‘So this place is technically The Gate at Gatewath.’
Skelgill screws up his face in a comic manner.
‘Ivver sin a yow lowp a yat?’
DS Jones laughs at his sudden lapse into Cumbrian. She thinks for a few seconds while she translates the vernacular.
‘Ever seen a sheep jump a gate?’
‘You do too many crosswords, Jones.’
‘Just for mental agility, Guv – it’s good brain gym for solving complex problems.’
‘My brain doesn’t need a gym – it’s got a mind of its own.’
She chuckles again. Only Skelgill can come out with these seemingly oxymoronic truisms, stated in all seriousness.
‘Anyway, Guv, it beats listening to DI Smart when you’re trapped for hours on a stakeout.’
‘I’ll give you that one, Jones. Stick to your crossword. Especially if it mithers him.’
‘You can be sure of that.’
Skelgill appears to approve of her stance, but now he shifts back in his seat as their meals arrive: sea bass and green salad for DS Jones, a hefty portion of home-made steak-and-ale pie for him, garnished with carrots and chunky fries. He has already emptied a basket of its mountain of rustic wholemeal bread, generously buttered, but shows no sign of a diminished appetite as they both tuck in while the food is piping hot. After a minute or two it is DS Jones who speaks, only now taking the opportunity to raise the subject of work.
‘I saw DS Leyton’s email about the CCTV, Guv. And the betting shop.’
Pensively, Skelgill takes a sup of beer.
‘Treat the bookie’s as a bit of a red herring.’
‘Think the owner was telling the truth, Guv?’
Skelgill shrugs.
‘No reason to suspect otherwise. She virtually offered us her own CCTV records. I don’t think Seddon was there on Monday.’
DS Jones nods acquiescently.
‘Just the supermarket, then, Guv.’
‘And not a lot from that, either. Went back to his van. Dropped off his phone and wallet and the newspaper. Then disappeared into thin air.’
‘Surely we’ll get a sighting, Guv – once we start asking? Especially if he went on foot. It’s not as though we’re talking Windermere, packed with tourists.’
‘Let’s hope so. It’s our only serious line of enquiry at the moment.’
‘Was he working in the area, Guv – or maybe on his way to do an estimate?’
‘But why not just park at the building site?’
DS Jones frowns.
‘I know, Guv – that doesn’t really make sense.’
‘Based on the calls we’ve traced from his phone, last week he had a job at Langwathby. He’d put up a scaffold for a big roof repair at a private house. Looks like that was all his kit out on hire. The roofers hadn’t finished on schedule – what with the rain we’ve had. So he was probably a free agent until they gave him the call to dismantle it.’
‘Still, Guv – at least we’ve got twelve noon nailed down. Quite possibly he was killed soon after he left the store – if you take the mid-point of the estimated range for time of death.’
There is a candle burning between them, its golden flame steady just below eye level. In the low light of the ancient hostelry DS Jones’s smooth tanned complexion is dark, and her striking features appear as sculpted shadows and highlights, hinting at an ancient and noble physiognomy. Skelgill stares broodingly at her before he speaks.
‘You said you’d had some thoughts.’
DS Jones, too, pauses before she replies, like an explorer coming unexpectedly upon a fork in the path.
‘On the case?’
Her question hints at an invitation for him to suggest otherwise. But Skelgill sticks to the straight and narrow.
‘Aha.’
Rather distractedly she shifts the untouched rice on her plate to make a space for her cutlery – which she places at five-twenty-five to indicate she has eaten sufficiently. Then she straightens her back and looks directly across at Skelgill.
‘It could be nothing, Guv – it’s just a minor detail.’
Skelgill frowns, and gestures with open palms to their surroundings, as if to indicate it has brought them here, and she ought to be forthcoming. She leans forward compliantly, lowering her voice a little.
‘The post-mortem report on Barry Seddon states that his underpants were on back to front.’
Skelgill is stern-faced.
‘You noticed that this morning?’
DS Jones nods.
‘I thought I’d wait until I could speak with you.’
Skelgill clears his throat.
‘Were you worried Leyton would make a joke of it?’
‘Something like that, Guv.’
Her reply implies it perhaps wasn’t only DS Leyton about whom she harboured a concern. After a moment’s consideration, Skelgill pontificates.
‘Truth is – there’s nothing unusual about that, Jones. Standard procedure for the second week of wear.’
‘Guv!’
She knows he’s ribbing her, and indeed now his features relax.
‘Then turn ’em inside out – get a couple more weeks’ use, front and back.’
‘That’s an awful thought.’
Skelgill shrugs indifferently.
‘If you were marooned on a desert island, why not?’
‘If you were on a desert island, Guv, you’d be surrounded by water – you could wash them.’
Skelgill gives a couple of seconds’ consideration to this proposition.
‘Depends who you were marooned with.’
DS Jones shakes her head, smiling resignedly.
‘I think you’re proving my point, Guv.’ She refers to her earlier reticence in raising the matter whilst outnumbered by male company.
Skelgill has a mischievous glint in his eye.
‘Don’t be shy, Jones – come a few years and you’ll be lording it over the likes of Leyton... and me. You should have the Chief in your sights.’ He drains the remainder of beer from his pint pot. ‘Okay – so what’s your real point?’
DS Jones sips from her water and replaces the glass carefully upon the table. She rotates it and stares into the clear liquid as a fortune-teller might interrogate her crystal ball.
‘What if he were dressed after he was killed?’
Skelgill places his elbows on the table and intertwines his long fisherman’s fingers beneath his chin. He blows softly at the candle, guttering the flame without extinguishing it.
‘Continue.’
DS Jones watches the candle recover its form, and then meets Skelgill’s gaze with a hesitant glance.
‘Guv – if it were a... sex game – gone wrong?’
Skelgill stares at her for a few moments, holding his breath. His eyes are steely and his expression sceptical. Then he sits back and exhales, forcing his breath through closed lips. The candle flickers in response.
‘We’re looking for a male suspect, Jones.’
Gently her eyebrows rise in a gesture that suggests, ‘It’s the twenty-first century.’ Skelgill is still frowning.
‘Jones – one accidental fatality – I could buy that. We’ve had it before. Curate’s wife comes home – finds the vicar wearing her bra and knickers, strung up like a chicken on the back of the bedroom door. She can’t face the public humiliation – so she calls the verger for help – they stage it like he got snagged by the rope in
the belfry.’
DS Jones looks mildly intrigued by Skelgill’s imaginative narrative.
‘You should write whodunits, Guv.’
But now Skelgill is not willing to be drawn into banter.
‘Two, Jones – two identical, accidental deaths?’ He shakes his head. ‘Impossible. And both bodies put on blatant public display.’
DS Jones does not appear perturbed by Skelgill’s antipathy. She presses her palms together in an attitude of prayer.
‘But, Guv – it would explain why the victims show no sign of a struggle. We know they weren’t chemically incapacitated. It looks every inch like they let it happen – at least, until it was too late. And in a dark room it would be easy to get the underwear the wrong way round.’
Skelgill does not respond. He watches her delicate hands as she rhythmically flexes them, fingertips together, like a beating heart.
‘Guv, I appreciate we have to explain why there were two murders – and why the killer, or killers, put the bodies in the fells – but how else can we account for the actual nature of the deaths?’
Skelgill raises an index finger, as if he is about to respond with a counter point, but then his phone, lying on the surface of the table, illuminates briefly to indicate an incoming message. He glances down and picks it up, but instead of opening the text he drops the handset into the breast pocket of his shirt. He seems distracted and looks over his shoulder uneasily. Then he pushes back his chair and indicates with a jerk of the head that he intends to pay a visit to the washroom.
‘Jones – you read the reports more thoroughly than I did – well done for that.’ (She nods once, obediently.) ‘But remember they also say there were no traces of sexual activity – neither Seddon nor Harris.’ He rises, and as he turns away he quips, ‘If it’s any consolation, Leyton thinks it's a lunatic farmer with a grudge against hillwalkers.’
DS Jones watches Skelgill pick his way between occupied tables and duck beneath a low oak beam into a narrow corridor marked for the toilets. The hint of a frown creases her normally smooth brow. The absence of such forensic evidence, of course, does not necessarily undermine her theory – a fact that ought to be obvious to Skelgill, despite his devil’s advocacy. When he returns from the gents’ he remains standing, taciturn, and rests his hands on the back of his chair. DS Jones looks up expectantly.
‘The waitress asked if we want a dessert, Guv – she recommended sticky toffee pudding with rum butter and double Jersey ice cream.’
Skelgill forces a smile. It would not be like him to eschew this local delicacy, but he appears already to have something else on his mind.
‘I need to make tracks.’ He looks pointedly at his wristwatch – an anachronism that must be for DS Jones’s benefit. ‘I told the neighbour I wouldn’t leave the dog too late. And she’ll want to chat before I can escape.’
DS Jones’s gaze falls away, her long lashes signalling disappointment.
‘Sure, Guv – it took us less than twenty minutes to get here.’
Skelgill ignores what might be a plaintive invitation to linger. Instead he pinches out the candle’s flame, before making his way through to the bar.
*
Indeed it is precisely twenty minutes later that DS Jones deposits her superior on the grass verge outside his house, and slowly drives away.
And it is only ten minutes after that when Skelgill’s long estate car slides out of his drive, turns in the opposite direction, and roars off into the darkening night. His chosen route will pick up the A66 westbound, and pass possible destinations such as Threlkeld, Braithwaite and Peel Wyke.
14. LINDA HARRIS – Friday morning
‘I got you a Rosy Lea and a couple of bacon rolls, Guv – so we can get a shift on.’
Skelgill tosses his jacket onto the back seat of the pool car, slams the rear passenger door, and slumps into position beside his sergeant. Immediately, he reaches for the brown paper bag on his side of the dashboard and critically inspects its contents. DS Leyton engages first gear and pulls away, ducking towards the windscreen until he finds the wiper control.
‘Shame about this rain, Guv – apparently it’s due to clear south of Manchester.’
‘There’s a surprise.’
‘That’ll be just over half way, I reckon, Guv – journey’s about two hundred miles.’
‘Warwickshire.’
‘That’s what I thought, Guv.’ DS Leyton has sensed Skelgill’s poor humour and is being diplomatic. ‘Turns out it’s Leicestershire.’ With his left hand he indicates a couple of sheets of typed notes that are folded into the central console between two takeaway tea cups. ‘Have a butcher’s, Guv.’
Skelgill yawns and settles back into his seat. For once he doesn’t tuck directly into the motorway services breakfast his sergeant has thoughtfully provided for him.
‘Tell me as we drive. How long do you reckon?’
‘The satnav’s showing three hours, Guv – nearly all on the M6.’
Skelgill, dangling the bag between his knees, closes his eyes. They have rendezvoused at Tebay southbound, subsequent to a lead that developed yesterday afternoon and was conveyed overnight to Cumbria. Among the many responses to the televised appeal for information concerning the deceased persons, one seems especially promising. An anonymous neighbour has identified a ‘Linda Harris’ (resident of a Midlands town called Hinckley) as the estranged foster mother of a ‘Lee Harris’ – the latter being of an age to match the description of the reported victim of the same name. Local police have investigated and established that these facts do indeed stack up, and a preliminary cross-check of dental records corroborates the identification. DS Leyton was alerted upon his early arrival this morning. Skelgill proved harder to track down, and it was about eight-thirty a.m. before he responded to his sergeant’s umpteenth call. In the background, there had been various indeterminate noises, which could have been birdsong, human voices or perhaps a radio programme. The inspector himself had sounded tired, terse and relatively disinterested.
‘I’ll take over the driving at Knutsford services.’
Skelgill is still resting his eyes.
‘Fine by me, Guv.’
*
‘This tea’s stone cold, Leyton.’
‘You’ve been asleep, Guv.’
‘No I haven’t.’
‘Guv – we’re past Sandbach.’
‘Don’t wind me up, Leyton – we’re still north of Lancaster.’
Skelgill blinks and squints through the windscreen, as if somehow the unchanging motorway stretching out before them will confirm his erroneous claim.
‘We’ve been going two hours, Guv.’
About a mile ahead there is a blue junction sign. They are closing on it rapidly and plainly this will settle the dispute. Skelgill must know the odds are against him. He tries a different tack.
‘I only wanted forty winks – you were supposed to wake me at Knutsford.’
‘Guv - you were out for the count. I thought it would be better to let you catch up on your kip.’
Skelgill is plainly irked that he has nodded off, and appears to be in denial about any such sleep deficit. His temper shows no indication of having improved, despite his extended catnap, and he now resorts to a sustained bout of swearing, peppered with words to the effect that DS Leyton should not take it upon himself to decide if and when his superior might require a siesta. This irrational argument, doubly unreasonable in light of DS Leyton’s considerate approach, rouses the normally phlegmatic sergeant to respond in kind; he is certainly Skelgill’s equal in the creative use of Anglo-Saxon terminology, and on this occasion justifiably gives as good as he gets.
Skelgill, of course, is not one readily to admit he is wrong – but DS Leyton has known him long enough to understand that behind his infallible exterior there will lurk a painful shadow of contrition, wishing for a glint of daylight. Thus, while something of a truce breaks out in the form of strained silence – Skelgill naturally having had the last (swear
) word – DS Leyton points out that he has placed the brown paper bag of bacon rolls in the cubby box of the central console, to keep them from becoming stale. Skelgill grudgingly investigates, and then begins to work his way pensively through what can only be an unsatisfactory meal, washing it down with the cold tea. Meanwhile, signs for Stoke-on-Trent come and go.
‘Decent rolls these, Leyton.’
DS Leyton grunts an acceptance of Skelgill’s oblique apology.
‘Forty minutes to go, Guv – that’s us well into the Midlands.’
*
The Midlands is very much an English as opposed to a British definition, for the actual north-south midpoint of the island of Great Britain corresponds to Windermere in the Lake District, just sixty miles short of the Scottish border. Indeed, Scotland has its own midlands, more generally referred to as the Central Lowlands. That said, the landlocked foxhunting county of Leicestershire certainly has a claim to being the historical heart of England, not least as it sits upon the once great Roman junction known as High Cross, where the ancient trunk routes of the Fosse Way and the Watling Street intersect. These days they are known more prosaically as the A46 and the A5 respectively.
It is just three miles north of High Cross that DS Leyton swings the car briefly from the motorway onto the Watling Street, before immediately turning into the outer suburbs of Hinckley. A former hosiery town, it is known as ‘Tin-Hat’ to its locals, who themselves are distinctive for their disproportionately northern-sounding brogue. At a latitude where the Brummie twang might be expected, the ubiquitous greeting for friend and stranger alike is ‘Ay up, me duck?’ (‘How are you, my Duke?’), and the place name itself is pronounced ‘Inkleh’; indeed the initial letter ‘h’ is foreign to most townsfolk. Apart from its friendly, good-hearted yeoman stock, the town itself does not have many claims to fame. In 1834 the original Hansom safety cab was developed here, while almost a century and a half later there was a brief frisson of publicity when one John Hinckley Jnr shot US President Ronald Reagan. Given the unusual shared spelling, there was speculation that the would-be assassin was in some way a descendent of the eponymous settlement.
Murder on the Edge (Detective Inspector Skelgill Investigates Book 3) Page 12