Rina filled the kettle and found the chocolate cake in the blue tin. A Victoria sponge sat cooling on a rack covered by what looked like a gauze umbrella to protect it from flies. The clock ticked softly on the kitchen wall and Rina let her gaze travel about the room. Beside the door was a large, framed poster of Rina in what had become her most famous and profitable role as Lydia Marchant in the television show Lydia Marchant Investigates. Lydia Marchant had paid for this house, and the ongoing fees from the popular series – it was estimated that Lydia Marchant investigated at least once every couple of hours somewhere in the world, dubbed into more than a dozen languages – still helped to pay the bills.
And now it had been revived. Rina still couldn’t quite believe it. Nine years after the last series had been aired, Rina had just finished the filming of a new one.
And, frankly, she was exhausted.
They had done the Christmas special the previous year, just to test the water, and that had been hard if pleasurable work, but the pre-sell had been so good that a first series had been commissioned even before the taster aired. Now twelve new, hour-long episodes had been completed and Rina was relieved and tired and very, very happy.
She made tea and settled down to enjoy her cake in peace.
Life is good, Rina thought. Fred, I just wish you were here to share it with me. She smiled a little sadly. She and Fred had enjoyed just five years of marriage before his death and there had been no one else to take his place in Rina’s life. But here, in her quiet kitchen in her beloved home, she could almost feel his arm around her shoulders and his gentle kiss as he welcomed her back.
THREE
‘Is this her?’ Mac asked, picking up a photograph from the dresser. It showed a smiling, blonde woman of, he guessed, about thirty-five and two children, a boy and a slightly younger girl. The girl wore a striped dress and a school cardigan with a stitched-on badge.
Frank looked at the picture and nodded. ‘That would have been taken about a year ago I think. The kids look a little bit older now and in that photo Megan’s still wearing her old school uniform. She joined Jeb at big school this term.’
‘Jeb? Same name as his father?’
‘Jebediah, yes. His dad and grandad were both Jebediahs. Some traditions just hang on round here.’
Mac nodded. He looked towards the body of Ellen Tailor. She had fallen backwards, away from the window, then hit what was left of her head on the edge of the kitchen table as she dropped.
She would not have felt that last injury, Mac thought.
‘Her killer let her have both barrels at short range,’ Frank said quietly.
The woman’s face was unrecognizable. Glass from the window had blasted into her alongside the shotgun pellets and the face and neck were just a mess of pulp and blood.
‘The kids?’
‘Saw everything,’ Frank confirmed. ‘Jeb thought she might have fainted or fallen so they both ran over to her.’
Poor little sods, Mac thought. ‘Any particular reason for them thinking that? I mean had she fainted before?’
‘Jeb said she’d had a really bad inner ear problem a few months back. Very bad vertigo. She fell over a couple of times.’
‘And no signs of robbery or’ – Or what?
Frank shook his head. ‘No, whoever killed her seems to have just fired the shots and then walked away.’
Rina’s family had descended en masse just after five. She had busied herself getting the evening meal ready – a job the Montmorencys usually undertook but one which felt pleasant to be doing after so long away.
‘Rina, Rina darling. It’s so good to have you home.’ Bethany and Eliza embraced her excitedly.
‘Happy to see you, my dear.’ Matthew Montmorency kissed her cheek, his long grey mane of hair brushing her neck as he bent his head. Stephen Montmorency, the shorter of the two and, unlike his supposed brother now getting a little bald on top, grasped her hand and kissed her other cheek. ‘Have you enjoyed yourself, Rina, dear?’
‘I have, Stephen, but I’m very glad to be home.’
The front door opened and closed again and two pairs of footsteps could be heard in the hall.
‘Ah,’ Matthew said. ‘Here they are. Give me that spoon, Rina darling. I’ll take over with the cooking. Girls, will you lay the table for me and Stephen, perhaps you’ll get the kettle on.’
Tim Brandon stalked into the kitchen, dressed in his usual black, his fiancée Joy at his side. Joy let Tim get his hug in first and then grabbed Rina. ‘It’s so good to have you home. You’ve got to come and see what we’ve done to the cottage and Mum says she’ll come for a visit next week and she’s looking forward to seeing everyone.’
She turned to the Montmorencys. ‘Anything I can do, boys?’
Rina shook her head in amusement and joined Tim at the kitchen table. ‘You look well,’ she said. ‘Now what do you have to tell me? How are the jobs? And have any of you seen Mac?’
Mac reckoned that his reversing had been honed almost to perfection since moving down to the south coast, but backing all the way down the narrow lane leading to the farmhouse and on to what Frank ironically called the main road tested even his skills. Avoiding the hedge, the ditch and the randomly parked police vehicles and the newly arrived mortuary ambulance did not add up to a whole lot of fun and he knew that the memory of the dead woman, seemingly burned on to his retinas, was not helping.
Ellen Tailor, he thought. Her name is Ellen Tailor and though he had never heard of her above an hour or so ago, she was now his responsibility.
Frank directed him to the Richardses’ cottage. The kids, running to raise the alarm, would have cut across the next field, Frank told him, but they would have to go round by road. It was only about a mile, but seemed, to Mac to be a mile of long, sweeping, blind bend. He swore as he fluffed a gear change.
‘You all right?’ Frank asked him.
‘I will be. Yes. But are you? I mean I didn’t even know the woman.’
‘Shocked,’ Frank said simply. ‘Violent death. It never gets any easier, does it.’
‘Not that I’ve noticed.’
‘I was out at the airfield last weekend. You know the de Freitases are setting up a bit of a museum in the old departure building?’
Mac nodded. He’d heard something about it. The de Freitases, Lydia and Edward, had moved back to the area a couple of years before. Edward had made money and wanted to reinvest in his old stomping ground. They’d started a software company, Iconograph, close to Frantham and also bought the old airfield and had been in the process of restoring it for the past year. They were preparing for the official opening later in the year. Although the little airfield would be open for business from early spring, the official relaunch had been scheduled to coincide with the Remembrance celebrations in November.
‘I was helping Lydia go through the donations,’ Frank went on. ‘Box after box of stuff. Some of it on loan from local families and some just been given. All the young men, all going off to fight. Just kids, a lot of them. You think they ever got used to it? The man next to you getting blown to bits? I tell you, Mac, I’m not cut out for it, even now.’
‘I don’t know,’ Mac said. ‘I suppose when you have no choice. Is that the place?’ A cottage, set a little back from the main road, hove into view.
‘That’s it, yes. Pull up on the verge.’
Mac parked up and got out of the car. The cottage was small and red brick. A shallow ramp led from the garden gate to the front door, a neatly tended garden on both sides. He caught a glimpse of a larger garden with small fruit trees behind. ‘I’m surprised this hasn’t gone to the holiday trade,’ he commented.
‘If the brother had his way, it would have done. He’d have sold off half the estate. That’s why when the old man died, he left the running of the Breed Estate to Carrie and her husband. Paid the son off, or so they say. He’s a bad lot.’
Mac would have asked more but the front door opened as they reached the gate and a mid
dle-aged woman, her greying hair tied back from her face came down the path to meet them.
‘Frank, thank the Lord you’re here. The poor little mites, they can’t stop crying and I don’t know how to get hold of their auntie. I’ve tried phoning their nan, but she’s not home and they don’t know her mobile. The number’s back at the house.’
Frank laid a soothing hand on the woman’s arm. ‘We’ll take care of it, Hilly. Now don’t you fret. This here is DI MacGregor, but he won’t mind if you call him Mac like the rest of us do.’
Hilly looked at Mac distractedly as though not quite taking him in and then led the way inside.
The cottage was small, one room downstairs at the front with a kitchen diner behind it. The stairs led off a small hallway and Mac noted that a stair lift had been installed and a lightweight wheelchair stood on the landing.
‘How long have you lived here?’ he asked.
‘What? Oh ten years or so. After the accident he didn’t want to move so we – the Butlers and me – we found ways of adapting. It’s not ideal, but I can’t see him settling in town.’
‘The Butlers. They own the Breed Estate.’ Mac nodded, aware that Hilly thought his questions irrelevant and even insensitive given the bigger, present issues. The living room seemed crowded as he and Frank followed her in. A man in a wheelchair sat beside an armchair, shared by two very distressed children. Mac recalled that Frank had given their ages as eleven and thirteen, but at that moment they looked much younger. Pale, tear-stained and cold, snuggled beneath a thick blanket despite the warmth of the tiny room.
‘Can I get you anything? Tea …’
‘No, thank you Hilly, we’re all right.’ Frank told her. He grabbed a little stool set beside the chair and sat down in front of the two kids, taking Megan’s hand and then Jeb’s too. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘So very sorry.’
‘Was it really Mum?’ Megan asked him and Mac remembered the bloody mess that had once been Ellen Tailor’s face.
‘I’m sorry, Megan, but yes, it’s her.’
Megan buried her face in her brother’s shirt but, Mac noted, kept a tight hold of Frank Baker’s hand. Mac was overwhelmingly grateful that his sergeant was there, that he was known to the family. That his big, friendly presence would have helped even had he not been familiar.
‘You’ve got an auntie, up in York, if I remember, and your nan’s just down the coast, isn’t she? How about if we get hold of them for you?’
‘We’ve been trying.’ Toby Richards spoke for the first time. ‘They think their nan might still be on holiday, she’s due back later today or tomorrow. We don’t have her mobile number and the aunt isn’t answering her phone and the kids don’t know where she works or—’
Frank nodded. It was clear that the Richardses were at a loss as to how to cope with this particular crisis.
‘We’ll make some calls,’ Mac said. ‘Get an appropriate adult down here and find Megan and Jeb somewhere to stay until we can get them to their family.’
He could see the relief in the Richardses’ eyes. ‘If you can just hold the fort for say, another hour? We’ll get someone to take over.’
‘You could phone Uncle Bill,’ Jeb said quietly. ‘He lives near here.’
It was the first time the boy had spoken and his voice trembled and almost failed.
‘Uncle Bill?’ Frank asked.
‘He means Bill Trent, lives over at Stone End, edge of the Breed land. It’s one of the places Carrie Butler sold off a couple of years back?’
‘I know it,’ Frank said. ‘But would he … I mean?’
‘We like him,’ Jeb said. ‘Mum liked him. We’d rather … I mean we don’t want to be more trouble.’
‘Oh, you’re no bother,’ Hilly said, and Mac could see she was frowning. It seemed that the idea of handing the kids over to this Bill Trent upset her more than dealing with them for a bit longer. He wondered why and made a mental note to find out later.
‘Mum’s phone book is in the kitchen,’ Megan offered. ‘We should have got it but—’
Frank patted her hand. ‘We’ll get it,’ he said. ‘And we’ll get you picked up very soon, I promise. And we’ll find your nan and your auntie and they’ll come and look after you.’ He stood up and looked from Hilly to Toby Richards. ‘We’ll be quick as we can, OK?’
Hilly nodded. ‘I’ll see you out,’ she said.
Hilly Richards walked with them down the garden path. ‘You don’t want to let them have anything to do with that Trent man,’ she said. ‘He’s not the sort. Not the sort at all.’
‘The sort?’ Mac queried.
‘To take care of children, of course. Too grumpy by half, he is. Not a good word to say for anyone. I don’t know why she encouraged him, I really don’t.’
‘The children seem to like him,’ Mac commented.
‘And can kids have that sort of opinion? What do they know?’
Usually quite a lot, Mac thought, but he kept his own counsel. ‘We’ll get a family liaison officer out to you,’ he said. ‘They’ll be able to organize something for the children until their family can take them.’
Hilly Richards nodded, but she was still clearly bothered.
‘Can you think of anyone who bore a grudge against Ellen Tailor?’ he asked.
‘Ellen? No. She wasn’t from round here but she’d done her best to fit. There was something said by some when she sold off so much of the farm. Some said she was selling the inheritance, you know? But I thought it was probably for the best. She was never a farm girl. She did well, considering. There were a lot said Jebediah should not have married her. He should have married a local girl, one that knew what to expect, but the younger ones, they have different ideas, don’t they?’
Have I just stepped back a century? Mac thought. He nodded absently and left Frank to make the final goodbyes.
FOUR
Mac and Frank Baker returned to the cottage where, they had been informed, DI Kendall awaited them. Mac had worked with Dave Kendall on a number of occasions. Based in Exeter, he had the resources that Mac lacked in his tiny Frantham outpost.
‘Mac, Frank,’ greeted Kendall, a blond, slightly heavy set man, who matched Mac for height, as he shook hands with his colleagues. ‘This is a messy one. What do we know?’
‘Not a lot,’ Frank told him. ‘We can narrow time of death to within about a half hour. One of our lads had the presence of mind to do a one-four-seven-one and call back the last number. She spoke on the phone to a Mrs Brigstock of the church flower committee in the village at ten past three. The school bus dropped the kids at the bottom of the lane at twenty to four. They found her dead when they got to the house.’
‘And they saw no one unusual?’
‘They saw no one full stop. But you’d have to know the area to be anywhere close by. There’s a public footpath runs up on the ridge and joins the coastal path about three miles in that direction. You get on to it in Cranstock village, which is a couple of miles back that way.’ Frank pointed back towards the main road. ‘You probably came through it to get here.’
Kendall nodded. ‘Hikers?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Not that we know of yet, but they’d have seen nothing. The farm is screened by the trees up there and if they heard a gunshot, well—’
‘They’d have assumed someone after rabbits, I suppose.’
‘More than likely. It’s not such an unusual sound to hear round here.’
‘So, how would the killer have left?’
Frank Baker shrugged. ‘Could have gone back up on to the ridge or cut across the field in that direction towards the village. The locals tell me there’s a gate back on to the main road. Or gone that way towards the Richardses’ cottage, which is the route the kiddies took. Could even have gone back down the lane. The school bus didn’t arrive until twenty to four, there’d probably have been time to walk down the lane and then cross the road into more fields. If you kept to the margins, close to the hedges, chances are no one would spot
you whichever way you went.’
‘Not even if you were carrying a shotgun?’
‘Provided you weren’t waving it about in a threatening manner.’ Frank shrugged. ‘Shotguns are part of the tool kit round here.’
Kendall scanned the ridge as Mac had done earlier and then turned back to the house. ‘And you were first on scene.’
‘I was, yes. I held the scene until the CSI arrived, then Mac got here and I handed off to Sergeant Conwell.’
‘Yes, I spoke to him. He says it doesn’t look as though the killer entered the house. Nothing seems to have been disturbed, nothing taken so far as anyone can tell. He’s been going through the phone book, trying to get hold of family. I understand he managed to reach Mrs Tailor’s sister just before you got back.’
‘That’s good,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll go and have a word if you’re done with me.’
Left alone, Kendall turned to Mac. ‘I understand he knows the family. He really shouldn’t—’
Mac stopped him with a wave of the hand. ‘Frank Baker grew up not five miles from here, his entire police service, apart from the odd secondment or training course has been served round here. There’s not many people Frank doesn’t know. He wasn’t a close friend, so there’s no real conflict of interest and right now I think his local knowledge is going to be crucial.’
‘Agreed,’ Kendall said. ‘I just felt I had to ask. How’s Miriam doing, by the way?’
‘Better,’ Mac said. ‘Enjoying her studies, though she’s only just at the induction stage at the moment. I think she’s relieved just to be looking at bones in the abstract for a while and not just in a mortuary.’
‘And she’s feeling better generally?’ Kendall asked carefully.
‘If you mean, is she over almost getting shot, then yes. Slowly. The dreams are down to every few nights now, so I suppose that’s progress.’
Kendall nodded, accepting that Mac was probably still having a fair few of those himself and maybe still felt uncomfortable talking about it. Scenes like this one must bring back the reality of what might have happened. Miriam could have been killed just as cruelly as this Ellen Tailor had been.
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