The skin over Iris’s high cheekbones and pointed chin tightened, making her face a triangular mask.
‘Mustn’t blame yourself . . . couldn’t possibly have known. Have you called the police?’
Melissa shook her head. ‘N . . . not yet. I was in such a state . . . I called you first.’
‘Must do it right away. Want me to?’
‘Would you?’
‘Sit tight. Shan’t be long.’
Melissa sat miserably hunched at the table, gripping her mug. Mechanically, she sipped at the coffee but it was too hot and burned her mouth. She could hear Iris on the telephone, giving directions. A moment later she came back to the kitchen.
‘On their way. Like me to come with you?’
‘Come where?’
‘You have to show them where it is.’
‘Oh, don’t call him it!’ The neutral, impersonal pronoun at once reduced the man to a cipher, robbing him of all human dignity. It was his life, not his identity, that had drained away in the waters he had fished as a boy and crossed a thousand times in the course of his daily toil. Only a few hours before, he had been a strong young man, full of good-humour and kindliness, someone she had met on her walks, stopping to exchange comments on the sheep or the weather, to pat his dog and enquire after his family. Now he was nothing but an inanimate thing, soon to be the subject of detached examination and dissection in some cheerless laboratory smelling of antiseptics and death. Melissa put a hand to her throbbing head.
‘First Babs, now Dick!’ she moaned. ‘I feel as if I’ve put a jinx on this place. You must wish I’d never come to live here.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ said Iris.
The uniformed officer who knocked on the door a short time later greeted them courteously and asked what seemed to be the trouble, ‘rather like a doctor called out to a case of stomach-ache’, Melissa reflected later. Sergeant Cook was a middle-aged, kindly-faced man who exuded an impression of all-round capability and who would, she felt, deal with drunks, delinquent children and violent criminals with the same unflappable competence. He introduced his colleague, a young constable who seemed a little on edge.
‘Think it’s junior’s first stiff!’ Iris whispered in Melissa’s ear as they waited by the stile for the two policemen to vault across.
‘It’s mine too!’ Melissa whispered back.
Iris squeezed her arm. ‘Stick by me — I’m an old hand!’
The grim little jest and the physical contact helped to steady her. The hysteria had passed, the paralysis was clearing from her brain.
The four of them made their way down to the brook. Melissa felt a tightening of her stomach muscles as they approached the bridge and she saw once again the still form on the ground beside it, but her voice was firm as she said, ‘There he is.’
‘Wait here please, ladies,’ said Sergeant Cook. ‘You watch where you’re putting your feet, young Matthews,’ he admonished the constable as they moved ahead. ‘May be clues on the ground.’
Matthews nodded apprehensively. Iris and Melissa watched, shivering, as the two men briefly examined the body. A radio hissed and crackled, metallic voices echoing in the stillness.
To Melissa it seemed both predictable and unreal, a macabre example of déjà vu, like watching a video of a scenario that she had described, without having ever actually witnessed it, in a dozen novels. Her mind ran ahead to the sequence of arrivals and events to come: the car-loads of detectives and the van bringing equipment; the pathologist, trying to assess the time of death; the photographer, stepping gingerly around the victim, shooting from every angle. They would cordon off the area and go over it with a toothcomb for clues; they would empty Dick’s pockets into a plastic bag before the final, grisly ritual of securing the hands and parcelling up the remains for conveyance to the mortuary slab. Would she be in trouble for moving the body? Surely not, she had only been acting on the frail, outside chance that there was still a life to be saved.
Sergeant Cook came back to them, leaving Matthews on guard. He trod the path as if walking barefoot on broken glass.
‘Shall we go back to your house, ladies? A senior CID officer is on his way and he’ll want to get statements from you.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Chief Inspector Harris was a thickset man whose features appeared to have been roughly moulded in reddish clay and left to dry in the sun. He had an unsmiling manner, small but penetrating eyes and a voice that suggested oily sandpaper. He chose an upright instead of an easy chair and waved the detective sergeant who accompanied him to a window-seat. Melissa sank into her usual armchair and Iris slid to the floor beside her and was promptly forgotten.
‘I understand it was you who found the body, Mrs Craig?’ said Harris. His tone was almost conversational.
Melissa nodded.
‘And according to Sergeant Cook, you recognised it as being that of a Mr Woodman of Rookery Farm.’
‘That’s right.’
‘What did you do when you came on the body?’
‘I pulled the man on to his back to get his face out of the water.’
‘Did you make any attempt at resuscitation?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ Melissa hesitated and after a second or two Harris prompted, ‘You were, perhaps, too shocked by your discovery?’
‘It wasn’t that. I just knew there was no point . . . he was dead.’
‘You’re a doctor?’
Melissa shifted uneasily. ‘No but I . . .’ She hesitated.
The keen eyes never left her face. ‘Yes, Mrs Craig?’
‘I’ve seen pictures of drowning victims. I’m a crime writer, you see and . . .’ The stumbling explanation sounded novelettish and far-fetched, almost an excuse for having lost her head and run from the scene in terror. The fear assailed her that she might after all have made a dreadful mistake, that Dick Woodman had still been alive when she found him and that had she stayed to give practical help he might have been saved. If that were true, and she had to carry that responsibility through the rest of her life . . . the prospect was too hideous to contemplate. But it wasn’t true; the livid marks on Dick’s neck and the wisps of green on his wrists were the proof.
‘So you thought you recognised the symptoms of drowning,’ said Harris.
She sensed rather than heard the sarcasm in his voice. He was making her look a fool. Worse. A fool who had been guilty of criminal neglect. The injustice of it made her face burn.
‘I recognised the symptoms of murder,’ she retorted.
She was aware of the detective sergeant’s head jerking up from his notebook and heard him gasp in surprise but Harris merely lifted an eyebrow and said, ‘You think this man was murdered?’
‘It seemed at first that it must have been an accident, that he’d come too fast down the bank, missed his footing and knocked himself out in falling. Then I saw the marks on his neck and I was sure they’d been made by someone holding him under the water. And I believe,’ she added as Harris appeared to be about to speak, ‘that he was killed somewhere else and brought to that spot to make it look like an accident. I also think I know why he was killed.’
The eyebrow rose a little further and the eyes almost disappeared. ‘Perhaps you’d care to explain, Mrs Craig.’
‘I’m sure you noticed the pondweed clinging to one wrist. The only place you’ll find that kind of weed is in still water. The brook is fed by several springs and runs quite fast through the valley.’
‘Indeed?’ If he was impressed, he gave no sign. He sat motionless in his chair, his legs planted apart and his thick, reddish hands spread over his knees. It was easy to imagine how even a hardened criminal might be unnerved by the deceptive simplicity of his questions and the piercing quality of his eyes. But she wasn’t afraid of him any more; despite his inscrutable exterior she sensed that she had won his respect, however grudging. His next question, however, threw her into complete confusion.
‘Are you in the habit of taking walks so early in t
he morning?’
‘I . . .’ she put a hand to her head. ‘Oh, my God, I’d forgotten! The drugs . . . the plane . . . that’s why they killed him, you see!’ The events of the night swirled round in her head and she put her hands up to her eyes.
‘I think perhaps you had better start at the beginning,’ said Harris patiently. ‘What time did you leave the house, and why?’
‘Dick Woodman telephoned early yesterday evening and asked to come and see me, but I’ll have to go back much further than that. It’s a very long and complicated story.’
‘Take your time, Mrs Craig.’ He listened impassively while Melissa recounted her visit to the flying school, Wally’s description of a piggy-back rider, her subsequent deduction that the reference to a sow farrowing that had puzzled Dick was in fact a coded reference to an expected illicit arrival of a plane-load of drugs. She described how she had seen the plane land, her narrow escape from detection and finally her discovery of Dick’s body as she made her way home. When she had finished, Harris sat silent for a while as if mentally digesting her story.
‘Perhaps,’ he said at last, ‘you can explain why you are so sure this plane contained drugs?’
‘I’ll try.’ She began with Clive’s phone calls and her first meeting with Bruce Ingram. As the story proceeded, Harris at last betrayed some reaction. His lower jaw moved a fraction and his eyes became marginally wider; when she described her initial visit to the U.P. Club, he and the sergeant exchanged meaning glances that brought a self-conscious flush to her cheeks. He did not, however, interrupt again until she came to her second visit and the way she and Bruce had trailed the couriers.
‘Just a minute,’ he interposed. ‘You told me that your friend on the Gazette handed over to us some pornographic photographs of a woman believed to be the victim of the Benbury Woods killing. Did he mention to the officer that he believed drugs were also involved?’
‘No, I don’t think so. At first he was convinced that the Up Front Agency was mixed up in a drugs ring. Then when I found the photographs, he decided it was a porn racket Babs had stumbled on. He . . . wanted me to sign on at the model agency to “suss it out”, he said . . . but I refused. I told him he should hand the photos to the police at once.’
‘Quite right too!’ A ghost of a smile lurking on Harris’s face made Melissa conscious of her bedraggled state. She probably looked tired and haggard, hardly a potential model. No doubt the young sergeant was laughing up his sleeve at her as well. She wanted to crawl into a corner and hide but Harris hadn’t finished with her yet.
‘So what gave you the idea that The Usual Place might be part of a drugs network?’ he asked patiently.
‘It arose out of a problem I was having with my current novel. It began with a bit of wild guesswork but the more we talked about it, the more it seemed an actual possibility.’
‘So you decided to do a little more private sleuthing?’
‘We really only meant to spy out the land and see where the women went with the trolleys, but when the opportunity presented itself to look inside them, it seemed too good to pass up.’ Melissa quailed at the sudden anger flaring in the detective’s eyes.
‘Did you have any idea of the risks you were running?’ he demanded. ‘Suppose you had been caught! Your duty was to come straight to us and tell us what you had discovered.’
‘That’s what I told Bruce . . . Mr Ingram . . . but he pointed out that we hadn’t really discovered anything. He wanted us to get hold of some concrete evidence by substituting a copy of the Gazette for one of the . . .’ For a moment, she thought Harris was going to explode and her voice died away in a fearful whisper. It would not have taken much to make her break down. ‘Then . . . all this happened,’ she finished and lowered her head to avoid Harris’s gaze.
There was another long silence. The sergeant flexed the muscles in his neck and fingers. Iris murmured something about coffee and stole out of the room. Harris loosened his collar and dragged at his tie. He looked weary; the lines on either side of his nose and across his forehead seemed to have deepened and the whites of his small eyes were speckled with red, as though the colour had seeped in from the surrounding flesh.
‘You seem to have had a very lucky escape, Mrs Craig,’ he said at last, speaking more gently.
‘Yes, I know. I suppose, when I realised what Dick’s message meant, I should have called the police right away, but it was nearly three o’clock in the morning and by the time they got here it might have been too late. I had no idea when the plane was due to arrive — for all I knew it was down already. As it was, I only just got there in time.’
‘Just the same, you took a very foolish risk.’
‘I know,’ Melissa repeated. She felt exhausted, dishevelled and badly in need of a bath and some rest.
‘I shall have to ask you to come down to the station later on today and make a full statement. I may need to see you again, and an officer from the Drugs Squad will certainly want to take a statement from you. We shall want to see Mr Ingram as well. Do you have his phone number?’
‘Here.’ Melissa flipped open her personal directory that lay by the telephone and pushed it towards Harris. ‘He may not be at home . . . he said he was going away for the weekend.’
‘Perhaps we’ll be lucky. May I?’ He was already dialling the number. Melissa glanced at her wristwatch; it was half past eight. Outside, it was broad daylight, the early sun lay soft and golden on the valley and the grazing sheep were scattered like creamy mushrooms over the sloping pasture. Dick’s sheep, the flock that he had watched over so carefully, day after day. Someone else would tend them now but who would care for Jennie and the children?
Rage and a desire for vengeance lit a slow fire inside her. It was the kind of fire that she had sensed in Bruce when he spoke of the drug dealers and their victims. If some of the responsibility for Dick’s death could be laid at her door, at least she could claim to have done something to bring his killers to book. Even if the actual hands that had held him down while he choked his life out in some filthy stagnant pond were never identified, there was a good chance that their owners would be in the net when it closed on the evil organisation that employed them. One way or the other, they would be made to pay for what they had done.
Harris had succeeded in rousing Bruce from his bed and seemed to be concluding some arrangements.
‘That’s fine. Thank you, Mr Ingram, and my apologies to you and the lady for any inconvenience. I can rely on you both to say nothing of this to anyone for the time being? . . . Thank you. Goodbye.’
‘You caught him then.’
Harris’s grin was as good as a wink. ‘I caught him all right. I’m afraid we’re going to upset his weekend arrangements but he took it very well.’
The implication was clear. Melissa wondered if the girl was Rowena and was surprised to realise that she did not mind although she was glad that Iris had not been there to hear. Iris had guessed how close she had been to getting her fingers burned over Bruce.
‘He’s as anxious as anyone to see drug dealers smashed,’ she told Harris. ‘It’s like a crusade to him.’
‘Maybe he knows someone who’s been hooked, someone close to him.’
‘Yes, it’s possible. He’s never actually said so but I know he feels passionately about it.’ Her thoughts went back to Dick. ‘And so do I.’
They were all on their feet and it seemed that the interview was over for the time being. Then Iris appeared with a tray of fresh coffee and a plate of bread rolls filled with goat cheese.
‘Thought you might be peckish.’ She had obviously been home to raid her own freezer; the rolls were of her own make, still warm from the microwave.
Harris, a half-eaten roll in one hand, was making a second call.
‘That you, Medhurst? Harris. Sullivan and I are leaving now. Any news of the PM? . . . Yes? . . . Yes, I see . . . well, keep that quiet for now. Have you broken the news to the widow? What? Any idea where she’s staying? Right,
when you see her, don’t say anything about foul play at this stage. Death was by drowning. That goes for the press boys too, and no names to be released, okay? And I want to talk to a senior man in the Drugs Squad the minute I get back.’ He replaced the receiver, took another bite from his roll, chewed and swallowed. ‘The post-mortem would seem to support your theory, Mrs Craig. Death occurred between approximately ten o’clock and midnight and it looks as if there was a clumsy attempt to make it look accidental. For the time being there’ll be no public statement to the contrary. I must ask you . . . and Miss Ash, of course . . . not to mention your suspicions to anyone else. Our Press Officer won’t reveal who found the body so you shouldn’t be troubled by reporters and Mr Ingram has promised to keep quiet about what he knows.’
‘Can we trust him, sir?’ Sullivan’s surprising intervention made everyone turn round. He was looking anxiously from one to the other. ‘I mean, he is a reporter, isn’t he? This is hot news!’
Harris’s eyes swung back to Melissa. They had lost something of their accusatory stare. ‘Mrs Craig knows him better than we do. Let’s ask her.’
‘I think you can trust him to do whatever you ask, Chief Inspector. He’s far more interested in seeing the ring smashed than in getting a story.’
‘Hardly a typical newshound,’ commented Harris drily.
Melissa smiled. She had come to this conclusion some time ago. ‘You could say that. The one you might have trouble with is his colleague, the girl who helped us track the couriers. She’s dead keen to get a scoop . . . but Bruce seemed pretty sure she’d have the sense to keep quiet if something big was about to break.’
‘Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind. Well, we’ll be going. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can arrange a meeting with the Drugs Squad. Meanwhile, I suggest you try to get some rest. And thanks for the breakfast.’
At three o’clock that afternoon, Melissa and Bruce stepped out of the headquarters of Gloucestershire Constabulary. It had been a mild, pleasant morning but thin cloud was beginning to drift in from the west and a chilly breeze blew dust and last year’s dead leaves across the forecourt. Rain had been forecast for the rest of the weekend.
Murder at Hawthorn Cottage_An absolutely gripping cozy mystery Page 25