by Jill McGown
‘Good. Sergeant Sandwell will be acting DI in the interim,’ said the ACC. ‘It is anticipated that Mrs Hill will return to Stansfield at the end of the secondment, and slot into the restructuring which will, with luck, be in place by then, in view of Stansfield’s increased responsibilities. Any questions?’
Lloyd had a question. How was Stansfield CID supposed to operate one more under-strength for a year? They had the increased responsibilities now. But he’d caused enough trouble for one day. ‘She might not be too keen on a desk job. She may take some persuading.’
‘Unless it means promotion,’ said Case.
‘It does,’ said the ACC. As you will see in the document I’ve given you, the post will carry the rank of Detective Chief Inspector.’
She wouldn’t kill him after all. She’d caught him up. She had always been going to; she had passed her promotion board first time. But Lloyd had secretly and guiltily hoped that she wouldn’t get a post until he had retired, or got promotion himself. Now he was going to have to deal with his regrettable tendency to male chauvinism on top of everything else.
And Judy would be coming back to Stansfield a DCI; it didn’t take too much brain power to see that this secondment was in order to achieve just that, and that early retirement was on the cards for him. And it was not impossible that Curtis Law’s programme had played a part in that decision.
‘When will DI Hill be told officially?’ he asked.
‘Oh … next week some time, I think. You can tell her yourself now, if you like. There’s no reason why not. He closed his copy of the report. ‘Thank you for your time, gentlemen.’
Judy was back at Bailey’s farm, looking at a body and trying not to breathe, her second-least favourite part of the job. Everyone’s least favourite was telling someone that their nearest and dearest was dead, and at least she was being spared that with this one. For one thing, it had been his wife who had found him, and had told everyone who needed to know, and for another, Bernard Bailey seemed to have been near and dear to a very limited number of people, as she had discovered when investigating the death threats. Death threats that she had, to all intents and purposes, dismissed.
But now he was undoubtedly, though not yet officially, dead. That conclusion had to await unnecessary confirmation by the Forensic Medical Examiner. There were bloodstains on his shirt and part of the sofa, a number of tears in his shirt indicating a stabbing. He had evidently been unwell at some point, a fact probably not unconnected to the bottle of whisky, about two-thirds full, which sat on the coffee table, a full glass beside it, and the empty bottle which lay on the floor. The smell of the whisky mingled with the other odours in the hot, airless room, its windows shuttered and locked, its radiators full on, for some reason. A browning apple sat amid the coffee-table clutter, roughly cut in two, the sweet smell making matters worse, but there was no knife. The duty inspector was organizing a search of the immediate grounds; they would have to draft people in if they had to search the whole place.
Judy wanted to talk to Mrs Bailey, who had apparently discovered her husband’s body, but she was being seen by her GP, who had been summoned by the officers first on the scene. They had arrived to find Steve Paxton trying to hit the Aquarius TV cameraman, the cameraman fighting back, Curtis Law trying to separate them, and Mrs Bailey in near-hysterics, screaming at them all to stop.
A blood-smeared copy of The Times lay on the floor beside the empty bottle, the crossword half done, as though Bailey had been surprised in the middle of doing it. Judy turned her head to one side to read the date, to discover that it was that morning’s paper.
She thought of her father then; she couldn’t imagine why, except that it had been a long time since she’d seen either of her parents. It was ridiculous; it was only a couple of hours away down the motorway. You’d think they lived in Australia. She didn’t even ring them all that often. She should go and see them. But then again, she thought, now might not be the best time, and she didn’t want to think about that. She had work to do.
The officers first on the scene had cordoned off Bailey’s office; they had found the safe open, and had thought it might have been a burglary gone wrong. It didn’t do to rule anything out, but his safe had been open the last time she had been here, and it was hard to see how a burglar could have got into the grounds, never mind the house, without Bailey knowing. The alarms were set, and the windows were all shuttered on the inside. The lights had been on in the sitting room and the office, and off everywhere else. She’d get the SOCOs to check the office out. If they ever arrived.
She left the body, and went up the steps, through the archway, to the dining area. A hatch to the kitchen was on her left; she looked through it to see by the sitting-room light a big, working farmhouse kitchen, equipped and decorated with the same eye to design. Gleaming, state-of-the-art kitchen units lined the walls under the two windows. The dark red quarry tiles of the floor contrasted with the pristine whiteness of the walls and the woodwork. Beyond that was the area that housed the big freezer, the washing machine and dryer, and the deep Belfast sink in which nameless dead rural things got unpleasant things done to them, she supposed. Not, she imagined, by the farmer’s wife. She could see from there that the back door was locked, the key still in it.
She turned round, the smell hitting her again as she went back down the steps, and forgot not to breathe through her nose. The room which had struck her as light and airy the first time she had seen it had been rendered claustrophobic and oppressive by the inordinate heat, the shutters, and the foul pot-pourri of sudden, violent death; Judy knew she had to get out of there. Now. She picked her way over the vomit, past the body, ducked under the blue and white ribbon barring the doorway, and went out into the hot morning, taking deep breaths.
She had thought, in her probationer days, that she would get over the revulsion, but she never had. She had simply learned how to control it, and she was never entirely convinced that she would always manage that. And outside was, she realized, not that much of an improvement. Nameless farmyard smells hung in the motionless air, only marginally better, to her nostrils, than the room she had just left.
Paxton was sitting at the table on the veranda; Judy took out her cigarettes, and sat down beside him, lighting one as he glowered over to where Curtis Law and his cameraman stood with Tom Finch.
‘Bloody vultures,’ he said. ‘ That girl was in a right state, and they’re filming, trying to ask her questions. They’d no business being here!’
‘A complaint will be made to Aquarius Television,’ said Judy. ‘But, to be honest, a video of the murder scene might be useful to us.’
‘If you give a bugger who did it,’ said Paxton.
‘You don’t, I take it?’ Judy said, expelling smoke with the words. It crossed her mind that maybe she shouldn’t be smoking, but, she dismissed the thought for a dozen different reasons. She hardly ever did, anyway. Only when she really felt the need. And when had she ever felt the need more?
‘He was a nasty piece of work. There won’t be many who’ll mourn Bernard Bailey.’
That much she had already surmised. ‘ Why did you work for him?’
‘There aren’t too many jobs in a place like this.’
‘How long have you worked here?’
He sighed. ‘Six years. I had my own farm, but it didn’t survive the recession.’
‘So you were here when the first Mrs Bailey was alive?’
‘If you can call it that,’ he said. ‘She was always pregnant – lost I don’t know how many babies. That’s how she died. She looked fifteen years older than she was, I can tell you that. And scared stiff of him, she was. At least this one stands up to him.’
That hadn’t been Judy’s impression. ‘Does she?’ she asked.
‘As best she can,’ said Paxton. ‘I mean, she’s got more about her than the first one. And she’s a nice girl – friendly, you know. There’s no side to her. She’ll muck in with everyone else if there’s a job to be d
one.’
Perhaps she did do nameless things to dead creatures in that big sink, thought Judy. She had obviously got a slightly misleading impression of Mrs Bailey.
Paxton shook his head. ‘ The way she looks, she could have done anything. Why she wanted to marry that nutcase, I’ll never know. I mean, all right, he’s got a lot of brass, but even so. He was a nutter. I mean,’ he said. ‘Look at this place. Like bloody Alcatraz. And she didn’t even have a key to the bloody gate.’
‘Do you know why he had all the security put in?’ she asked. ‘Was it because of the vandalism?’
Paxton shrugged. ‘That’s what he said. But he wanted her where he could see her. He told me if he caught anyone letting her in without his permission, he’d get his cards. And I know he didn’t like folk just being able to walk in,’ he said. ‘Let his shotgun off at McQueen first time he came here.’
Judy’s eyebrows rose.
‘I’m going back a bit now,’ Paxton said. ‘To when the first Mrs Bailey was alive. I was with some of the lads, heard the gun go off. We ran up here, thinking there’s been an accident, or that Mrs Bailey has finally let him have it between the eyes, and find McQueen having a real go at him, shotgun or no shotgun. Bailey’s scared stiff. Yells to us to get McQueen off him and throw him out.’ He grinned. ‘We let McQueen get in a few before we grabbed him. Mind, he saw him again after that, and there was no trouble that time. And that was a while before the alarms went in, so it might not have had anything to do with that. Or with her. It could have been the vandalism, I suppose. But that’s what he was like,’ he said, tapping his forehead. ‘He was a nutter, I’m telling you.’
‘Tell me about yesterday. We were told there was going to be some sort of demonstration here.’
Paxton nodded. ‘Your lot were here, for a while. Till they decided it wasn’t going to happen. TV was here all day. No demonstrators, though. Bailey had the alarms set all the time, and all the windows locked and shuttered all day. God knows who he thought was coming. Genghis Khan at the very least.’
‘What about the front door? Had he locked it?’
‘No. It was closed, but it was unlocked. Has to be, really, so that he can get in and out to the office. And the entryphone’s in there, of course. He had to answer it himself, with Mrs Bailey being away.’
So, Mrs Bailey had been away. Judy was instantly suspicious of spouses who happened to be away at the material time.
‘Did he let anyone in?’
‘Not while I was here. I let the others go at five, and I knocked off at six.’ He smiled sourly. ‘He didn’t want me to go,’ he said. ‘He was scared shitless.’ He put a hand to his mouth in mock disapproval of his language. ‘Sorry. But he was.’
He quite possibly had been, thought Judy, remembering the smell with unwelcome clarity. ‘ Did he have the radiators on in the sitting room?’ she asked.
‘Radiators?’ he repeated. ‘I didn’t even have the sheet over me in bed last night, so I wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘Did you notice anything unusual when you got here this morning?’ she asked.
He shook his head.
‘When does the morning paper get here?’
Paxton looked slightly puzzled. ‘Half six or so. They arrive in the village about six, and the lad does the farm first, I think. He leaves the paper in the mailbox by the gate. But you’ll be able to find out from the video exactly when it came.’
Judy had yet to see what the video had picked up from the camera that watched Bailey’s gate. Tom Finch had stopped the tape when he arrived, intending to check it, but for the moment he had his hands full. DC Marshall was on his way; she’d get him to look at the tapes, which had to be their best witnesses.
Fourteen alarms, six cameras, shutters on the windows, and Bernard Bailey had somehow contrived to be stabbed to death on his own sofa. The monitor was in the hallway, so he could check who was at his gate before he opened it for anyone. The front door had been unlocked, but the alarms had been set, and she knew from personal eardrum-rattling experience that they could not have gone off without alerting everyone for a mile in every direction.
Bernard Bailey had let someone in, and that someone had killed him, or he was killed by someone with a key to the gate. Or he was killed by someone already in the house, whatever Steve Paxton believed about Mrs Bailey being away. Had Mrs Bailey stabbed her husband to death when he was in the middle of having an apple for breakfast, and doing the crossword? A number of things argued against that. Did he have whisky for breakfast, too? He had not, as far as Judy had been able to see, attempted to defend himself, which suggested that he had been asleep, probably drunk. And she couldn’t really imagine Bailey doing a crossword.
Her father did crosswords; so did Lloyd. And they had something else in common; they both loved talking. They could talk for England. Well, Lloyd could talk for Wales. Her money would be on him, if he and her father staged an international, but it would be a close-run thing.
She felt homesick again, as she looked round this green, alien, rural world with its organic smells, and distant animal noises, and longed for London’s traffic-ridden, fume-filled, people-thronged streets. But that wasn’t what she was supposed to be thinking about: How had she got on to that? The crossword. Yes. The crossword. And the fact that the word-sparing Mr Bailey didn’t strike her as a crossword-doer.
‘Was he a crossword man?’ she asked Paxton.
‘Wouldn’t know. I doubt it.’ He looked at her, squinting in the sun. ‘ Why’d you want to know that?’
She smiled, not answering him. ‘Why did no one find him before his wife came home?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t anyone think it odd that he wasn’t up and about at that time in the morning?’
Paxton shook his head. ‘ We never saw him till afternoon,’ he said. ‘And she keeps the blinds closed anyway, because of the paintings, so no one coming up this way would notice the shutters.’
‘Thank you,’ said Judy. ‘I can let you get back to work. I might want to speak to you again, though.’ The entryphone buzzed, and she went back in, answering it to the FME, thank God. She hit the gate-open button. ‘On second thoughts,’ she said, calling Paxton back. ‘You couldn’t man this thing for me, could you? Just keep out anyone who isn’t police. Tell them it’s a crime scene.’
‘Yes, sure, if you want.’
She looked round for somewhere to extinguish her cigarette, and Paxton took it from her, grinding it out on the veranda, and took up his post as the Baileys’ GP came downstairs.
‘How is Mrs Bailey?’ asked Judy, taking the doctor out into the courtyard where they could not be overheard.
‘She’s not too bad now,’ she said. ‘But she’s still very agitated. If you can leave it for an hour or so before you speak to her, it would be better. And if it’s any help, I believe she really did get a terrible shock.’
Judy smiled at the implied assumption that Rachel might have wanted to stab her husband to death. ‘ She’s not the only candidate,’ she said.
‘Oh, no – of course. He was getting all those threats earlier in the year, wasn’t he? Do you think someone killed him over this business about the road? Surely not.’
Judy sincerely hoped not. There hadn’t been any threats in recent weeks, but perhaps that was because the sender had got serious. She gave a little shrug, and watched the doctor leave, thinking about that day when Bailey had dragged her through every muddy inch of his precious land. Now, now when a few muddy footprints might help, where was all that mud? Now, everything lay rock-hard and dry in the heatwave that was now nearly a fortnight old, and showed no sign of passing.
The FME was arriving, the two doctors’ cars passing on the roadway, and Judy prepared herself to go back into the house, into the room. At least Mr Bailey was about to be pronounced officially dead, which was a step in the right direction. But finding enough people to interview employees, watch videos, check on keyholders, search for the murder weapon – all that was proving very difficult,
at the start of the summer-holiday season.
‘Just doing our jobs, officer,’ said Curtis, sounding a lot jauntier and cheekier than he felt, when Sergeant Finch had finished reading them the riot act about contaminating scenes of crime, looking a little like an offended cherub.
‘Yeah, well, when your job starts interfering with my job, mate, my job wins.’
Curtis smiled. ‘I suggest you watch Aquarius TV at ten-forty this evening and see if you still think that at eleven-thirty.’
Finch frowned, but ignored the remark. ‘Were you filming when you went into the house?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Curtis felt a bit guilty about that. ‘Sorry. But you know cameramen.’
‘What did you expect?’ said Gary. ‘It was a story. And stories on TV need pictures, don’t they? What did you think I’d do? Memorize it all, and draw pictures when I got back to the studio?’
‘We’ll want the film,’ said Finch. And there’s no way you’re going to be allowed to show it.’
‘Not now. But after, maybe. And it’s not a film,’ Gary added, removing the tape from the camera. ‘It’s a video. You can have it. But you’ll have to watch it in the studio in Stansfield – it won’t play on an ordinary VCR.’
Finch took it, and Gary reloaded. Curtis was worried about Rachel – she had looked so awful when they went in. Her face had been white, and she had been trembling from head to foot. He had wanted to hold her, comfort her, but he couldn’t. And then that oaf had come in and started a barney, the police had arrived, and she had started screaming.
‘Is Mrs Bailey all right?’ he asked.
‘Wouldn’t know,’ said Finch. ‘Shouldn’t think so, not if her husband’s just been stabbed to death. Someone will be in touch about having a look at this,’ he said, nut I don’t think we need detain you any longer.’
Curtis wanted to be detained; he wanted to see Rachel. He tried desperately to think of some good reason why he should stay.
‘You don’t mind if we hang about, do you, mate?’ said Gary. ‘ I mean, we’d be here anyway by now, right?’