by Jill McGown
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.
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Contents
Jill McGown
Spring
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Summer
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Jill McGown
Picture of Innocence
Jill McGown, who died in 2007, lived in Northamptonshire and was best known for her mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Lloyd and Sergeant Judy Hill. The first novel, A Perfect Match, was published in 1983 and A Shred of Evidence was made into a television drama starring Philip Glenister and Michelle Collins.
Spring
Chapter One
‘Death threats? Away, man.’ Mike McQueen’s Tyneside accent had been modified by years of working and living wherever he saw the potential for building development and by the wealthy lifestyle he had thus acquired, but he liked to remind people of his working-class roots from time to time. His wife wished he wouldn’t. He raised his eyebrows at the good-looking young man who was helping his cameraman attach the microphone.
‘Window’d be favourite,’ muttered the cameraman. ‘Trees in the background, blossom on the grass, raindrops on the window.’
‘Death threats,’ repeated Curtis Law. He was one of the reporters from Aquarius TV, their regional network, his light brown hair cut and styled in a way that only media people could be bothered to keep their hair, his suit sober but stylish. And he was whippet-thin, of course. Mike had been like that once, thirty years ago.
‘He’s been getting them since January. You must have heard about them, Mr McQueen, even in this desirable ivory tower of yours.’
Mike smiled. He had once been very like young Mr Law. Eager, sharp, a bit on the cheeky side. A barrow boy, really, with the polish that even a state education gave you, if you put it to good use, but a barrow boy all the same. Sixty years of staying alive had knocked a lot of it out of him, and it would knock it out of Curtis Law too, in time. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about them. But I doubt if there’s anyone in this village who hasn’t wanted to kill Bernard Bailey at one time or another. I also doubt that they’re serious, unfortunately.’
Law grinned. ‘Wait till we’ve got the videotape running,’ he said.
Mike smiled again. ‘I won’t say anything like that when you’ve got it running. You should know that by now.’ He took a cigar from a box on the desk, then belatedly, and with no expectation of acceptance, offered the box to the other two.
He didn’t overeat; he didn’t drink to excess; he was kind to animals and small children. Smoking was, when he came to think of it, his only vice, though he would succumb to another if he was given the chance. Not that he would be – she didn’t think of him like that. He was an old man as far as she was concerned. She called him Mr McQueen.
The cameraman shook his head, but Law, to Mike’s surprise, took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘I’ll stick to these, if that’s all right,’ he said.
Mike waved away the gold lighter which Law held out; you needed a match to light a decent cigar. ‘Surely the death threats are old news,’ he said.
‘These ones are different,’ said Law. ‘They’re obscene. And explicit as to how he’ll die.’
Mike knew that too, but he feigned slight, and uninterested, surprise. ‘Is that right?’ he said. ‘Fancy.’
‘But who would actually issue death threats over this business?’ Law asked, the cigarette burning between his lips as he concentrated on what he was doing. ‘That’s the sort of thing I’ll be asking you. I mean – you want his land, he doesn’t want to sell … you seem a prime suspect. Scare him out.’
Mike sat at the desk as instructed by the cameraman, side on to the view of the trees silhouetted against the pale grey sky, and drew thoughtfully on his cigar. ‘I don’t mind telling you that I’m pissed off with the whole business,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t believe the sort of money Bailey’s turning down just so he can hang on to a piece of land he doesn’t farm any more. But I’m not creeping round his farm in the middle of the night leaving death threats.’
‘Oh, bugger,’ said the cameraman. ‘ Is that guy going to clear away the blossom?’
Mike saw his gardener walking purposefully across the lawn with a rake, and nodded. ‘ ’Fraid so,’ he said, with no intention of disrupting the man’s work to suit a couple of TV types. He’d have thought a gardener clearing the fallen blossom would have been fine, like a scene from a thirties musical. But it was, it seemed, merely distracting. After some discussion, he found himself sitting at the desk like a schoolboy, with the cameraman to his right. The background was his bookcase.
‘Do you read a lot?’ asked the cameraman.
‘Yes,’ said Mike. ‘ I read several books at once. At the moment, I’m reading—’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Level’s fine. We’re ready.’
Mike laid his cigar down in the ashtray, and placed it beyond the camera’s range. These days it was more than your life was worth to be seen smoking on the box, even something as civilized as a Havana cigar.
Law reached over, stubbed out his cigarette, and began the interview. ‘Mr McQueen, who do you think is responsible for these death threats?’ he asked, and tilted the microphone in Mike’s direction.
‘Well, I understand that I’m the prime suspect,’ said Mike, smiling broadly. ‘But all I’m doing is offering to buy Mr Bailey’s land – whether or not he sells it to me is entirely up to him.’
‘But you are very keen to buy?’
‘I have to build a road to the Rookery. The alternative is to go through a large tract of woodland whose owners are quite willing to sell. It’s costing me time and money trying to persuade Mr Bailey to sell me his land instead.’
‘Why spend the time and money?’ asked Law. ‘ Why not just go ahead with the alternative route? Wouldn’t that make more business sense?’
‘I have no wish to make any more impact on the environment than is necessary,’ Mike answered, smoothly and expertly, right down to the concerned look. ‘Even the environmentalists agree that unused fields are better candidates for development than much-loved and ancient woodland – perhaps they’re sending death threats. All I can tell you is that I’m not.’
‘And you are prepared to take a loss in order to conserve the countryside?’ The tone was faintly mocking, the eyes cynical. ‘ It wouldn’t be because you actually live in Harmston, and you don’t want this road in your own back yard?’
‘Partly,’ said Mike, with what he hoped would be seen as disarming honesty. ‘My wife and I have lived in this community for almost eighteen months, and we very much enjoy it here. I’ve no wish to be responsible for the loss of a natural amenity.’
In previous interviews on the subject of Bailey’s farm he had been on the side of the angels for possibly the first time in his life. But the death threats had put a new spin on the story; now it was Bailey himself who was under threat, and the tone of the interview had altered. Bailey was being seen as a man persecuted, driven to breaking point by the
pressure to sell land which he had every right not to sell. And Mike was the property developer who had brought about this unhappy state of affairs, who was plundering the countryside for his own gain, and who was attempting to shift the blame for that on to Bailey, whose only crime was to own land that he wasn’t farming. Once again, Mike was wearing a black hat. But he was used to that, and he parried the questions with ease. He had appeared on more regional television news programmes than young Mr Law had, he was sure.
‘Mike McQueen, thank you very much,’ said Law, wrapping up the interview. He stood up. ‘Would it be all right to do a few reaction shots?’
‘Of course,’ said Mike, retrieving his cigar. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
He left his study by the French window, going out into the warm, wet May morning, relighting the cigar under the shelter of the roofed terrace and watching the smoke as it drifted through the soft, fine rain that fell on to the lush grass of his lawn, now cleared of the blossom his gardener found untidy. The grass had had its first few mowings of the season, and was still cut high. Soon, the blades would be set lower, then lower still, until it was at its summer height. He smiled a little at himself, at his surroundings.
He had grown up in a back-to-back in Newcastle with a concrete yard and an outside toilet. He had left school at fifteen, and had got a job as a tea boy on a building site. He had seen even then the potential in property, and had learned everything he could about building and builders. By the time he was twenty, he had bought his first derelict row of cottages, and by the time he was twenty-two, he had had money in the bank, something his father had never achieved. That was when he had met and married Shirley, a service widow with a three-year-old daughter. They had tried for another baby, but it wasn’t to be, and thus it was that when Shirley’s daughter left home, they had found themselves with just one another for the first time. If, since then, the marriage had evolved into one merely of companionship, it didn’t really bother Mike. He had become a rich man, which had always been his true objective, and when this final project was complete he and Shirley would retire in luxury, and remain companions until death did them part.
The media were leaving; they came out past him, thanked him, got into the cars that sat in his gravelled driveway and roared off down towards the big cast-iron gates.
It was fate, he supposed, that had led him to Harmston, and the greenfield site that the county council was keen to develop, because here, by pure chance, he had found something for which he had long ago stopped looking, and he had used every ounce of guile he possessed, every trick of persuasion he had ever learned, to have his plans accepted, to sweep aside the objections, to get the Rookery built.
And now, it needed a road. He had established that Excelsior Holdings, a company based in London for whom the woodland was a distant and costly irrelevance that they could turn into hard cash, would be prepared to sell. And then, when that news was greeted with horror by the villagers, he had made it known that he had already made an offer to Bailey, and had been turned down. Now everyone knew that all Bailey had to do was sell to him, and the road wouldn’t go anywhere near the woodland. If it had to, it would, but he sincerely, honestly, devoutly hoped that it wouldn’t ever come to that.
Not because he gave a toss how many people would be deprived of a natural amenity, how much flora and fauna would lose its home. And not because he had any deep sense of community, for he and Shirley had deliberately kept out of village life. Apart from Bailey, they knew about half a dozen of the inhabitants by name, if that. Some of them he employed; he had had dealings with just two others, and that only because they had approached him.
So it was for neither of the reasons he had advanced to Curtis Law that he was holding fire on felling the oaks and the elms. He simply wanted Bernard Bailey’s land, and he would do just about anything to get it.
‘Death threats?’ Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd’s tone of voice, and the exaggerated Welshness which ran the words together with just a single ‘th’, indicated that he was less than impressed. ‘Can’t the uniforms deal with it? Sir,’ he added, smoothing down the dark hair at the back of his head, the only place he really still had any, and it needed a trim. His boss had become slightly more insistent on deference since the Chief Superintendent rank had been abolished, and the gap between him and Lloyd had been reduced to just one rung.
Detective Superintendent Case, with a full head of hair, although he too was looking at fifty from the wrong side, shook his head. ‘They were dealing with it,’ he said. ‘If you can call it that. But it’s a bugger, Lloyd. He had the whole place ringed with alarms because his machinery was being vandalized. And someone’s got through not once, but over and over again, and left death threats all over the place. The man was getting them on a weekly basis at one point. Now it seems they’ve turned even nastier. I think CID needs to take a look, at least. The reporter who’s been covering the story just rang the press officer to ask what we intend doing about it. I think his words were if whoever it was could deliver death threats, he could deliver death. And you can’t really argue with that.’
They sounded like a reporter’s words, thought Lloyd, but he supposed Case was right. ‘I’ll send someone,’ he said.
‘Do. And not a DC, either,’ added Case. ‘ Send someone with a bit of experience, and a bit of rank. Bailey’s an awkward customer at the best of times.’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘Is this all because he won’t sell his farm to a property developer?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Since when were they the good guys?’
‘Since the alternative meant the rape, of the countryside,’ said Case. ‘According to the conservationists.’
‘Aren’t people’s jobs more important?’
Case shook his head. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘They would have been up until a couple of years ago. But just after his first wife died, Bernard Bailey – what’s the word they use nowadays? – downsized what he actually farms. He’s got seventy-five per cent of his land doing nothing, uses casual labour when he needs it for the rest. It would mean the loss of three or four full-time jobs at most.’
‘Is he a friend of yours?’ asked Lloyd.
‘Not a friend, exactly. We’ve met. You know how it is. The thing is …’ he said, and paused.
At last. Case always took for ever to get to the point. You always had to have what Lloyd thought of as the Case history first.
‘We haven’t exactly acted like greased lightning over the vandalism,’ Case went on. ‘And as far as I can see, we’ve done sod all about the death threats. Bailey’s getting meaner by the minute, as you can imagine. And – well, we’ll both be attending a function tonight, and I’d like to be able to look the man in the eye rather than spend all night avoiding him.’
Case and Bailey belonged to the same lodge, no doubt. Lloyd had never been introduced to the arcane rituals of Freemasonry, and never wanted to be. But Case had, and you didn’t really need to be a detective to work out why Mr Bailey’s problems had a special significance.
‘It goes on until the small hours, and I can think of better ways of spending the time than being told I can’t do my job. Take pity on me, Lloyd. Send someone who’ll keep him off my back for tonight, at least.’
A public relations exercise. Lloyd disapproved, basically, of the Brotherhood, but the man was nonetheless receiving death threats, and someone ought to be doing something about it. He rather thought he might go to see Mr Bailey himself. Bailey could hardly complain about his rank, and Lloyd fancied he came over quite well on the box. He could certainly handle a reporter that spoke journalese.
‘Not you,’ said Case, in an accurate assessment of Lloyd’s unspoken thoughts. ‘You and I are going to headquarters’He picked up a fax. ‘To discuss the – and I quote – ‘‘eighteen-month-long spate of drug thefts from chemists, hospital dispensaries, hospices, research establishments, doctors’ surgeries, et cetera, the clear-up rate of which is far from satisfactory, and the seriousness of which means that
they must be given top priority’’. The ACC is still suffering from verbal diarrhoea, poor chap.’ He looked up. ‘But we have to go. So send someone else, Lloyd. Even if you do like being on the telly.’
‘It’s not like it was in Sherlock Holmes’s day,’ Lloyd said, ignoring the jibe. ‘ Hasn’t anyone told the ACC that? They don’t smoke Turkish cigarettes with distinctive ash – they don’t leave behind them the telltale aroma of Arabian body oils. They’re just junkies looking for pills to pop or something to sell.’
‘Mm. He thinks it might be more organized than that. It seems that this reporter – the same one that’s covering the Bailey business – has been critical of our – and I quote again – ‘‘piecemeal approach’’.’
‘Which reporter? Curtis Law?’
‘That’s him. Do you know him?’
‘He’s been going on about this for months! He’s the one who thinks it’s organized, not the ACC. If that’s what this conference is about, it’s a complete waste of time.’
‘Fifteen minutes, my car, waste of time or not.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Lloyd, knowing when he was beaten.
He went downstairs to the CID room, and considered Tom Finch, who was a sergeant, and therefore of a rank regarded as suitable. Of course, he looked about fifteen, with his curly fair hair and his cheeky grin, so he wouldn’t do, despite the fact that he was thirty, married with two children, and a very able officer. Besides, Judy had never been blooded in the sport of TV interviews. ‘Is DI Hill back from court?’ he asked, jerking his head at Judy’s door.
‘Yes, guv,’ said Finch, who liked to think that he was in a TV cop show. ‘Her new wheels can shift a bit, can’t they?’
Lloyd knocked on Judy’s door, and smiled at her. What more could Case and his fellow Masons want? A detective inspector, no less. One with twenty years’ service. One with clear-eyed common sense, and brown-eyed, brown-haired, exceedingly pleasing looks. One with instinctive dress sense, and a knack of getting to the bottom of little puzzles, which this surely was. One who would not only talk intelligibly to Bailey and the media, but intelligently, and in a middle-class, educated accent at that. The education had veered a little too much towards maths and logic for his taste – he preferred language and literature – but all in all, as packages went, Judy was a very elegant one.