Holy Blood

by Kim Fleet

  ‘Why did he call you Sara?’

  ‘Because that’s my name. My real name.’

  ‘How many names have you got?’

  She barked a short laugh. ‘Too many. But now, only one.’

  ‘What did he want? Nick?’

  ‘To find out why I wasn’t dead.’ She picked at a bit of loose skin around her thumbnail. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

  He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, then closed it again. ‘There’s something you should know. It’s about Lewis Jordan.’

  She flopped into an armchair. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He stole the Holy Blood.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘It was obvious from the way he was around it.’

  ‘That’s what Lisa said.’ Aidan crouched down beside her. ‘She told me she went to his hotel room and stole it back.’

  Eden sat up straight in her chair. ‘It was her? Not you?’

  ‘Not me.’ He took her hand. ‘Don’t get mad, but we went for dinner after the filming, there was a flyer on the table and I folded it into a swan. She must’ve pinched it and then dropped it in Lewis’s room.’

  ‘So it was your swan.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Why did you lie?’

  ‘I knew it must’ve been Lisa in Lewis’s room, and I was frightened she’d killed him.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘I was trying to protect her.’

  Eden stared at him. ‘Even though you thought she’d committed murder?’

  When he didn’t answer, she scrambled out of the chair. ‘I need to speak to Lisa.’

  ‘I don’t think …’

  ‘Don’t you understand? She might be the last person who saw Lewis Jordan alive.’

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  Friday, 30 October 2015

  07:14 hours

  She awoke to a grey sky and squally rain rattling against the window pane. She’d slept badly, dreaming she was still married to Nick and they were taking Molly to the park, the zoo, her first day at school. Each time she jolted awake, she remembered anew that Nick and Molly were long gone, yet when she slept again, the film reel continued.

  Finally, she crawled out of bed and switched on the television news. Normally she liked the intimate chuntering of the radio, but this morning she wanted colour and flashing images, and the mix of the deadly serious and the locally heartening. Her muscles were stiff and her back creaked when she stretched. Maybe a run would clear the fog in her head.

  Eden tugged on her running gear and plugged in her earbuds, zooming up the volume so her head filled with pop music. Cheesy, but it had a good beat, and she pounded along the pavements, her hands blooming red in the cold, and her gloom lifted. Down to the university campus, around the lake and along the paths through the gardens, past the Bath Road shops and back through the Suffolks. She did a quick lap of Imperial Gardens and was about to head for home when she wondered if any more letters had come for Lewis Jordan.

  Jerking the buds out of her ears, she went through the hotel’s revolving door and into reception. There was a man at the desk, youngish yet looking like a refugee from an Evelyn Waugh novel in a green three-piece tweed suit with purple flecks. On his feet were shiny brown brogues. One glance and she knew exactly what he was. Posture a little too erect. An air of self-confidence and swagger about him. He was from her old life – a spook.

  He was leaning on the reception desk and saying, ‘I know it’s not that valuable, but it’s the principle. Someone’s been in my room and taken something.’

  ‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ the receptionist said. ‘Are you sure you couldn’t have misplaced it? All our staff have the best references, I’m sure no one would have stolen anything.’

  Hah! Eden thought. The hotel manager had told her that there had been a spate of minor thefts from guests’ rooms. Nothing particularly valuable, but thefts none the less.

  The casualty of Waugh reddened. ‘It’s missing. I’ve checked everywhere and it’s gone. Now what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Would you like me to phone the police?’

  ‘No, it’s not worth it, but I’ll speak to the manager. Petty pilfering is a bad sign.’

  As he moved away from the desk, Eden approached him. ‘Excuse me?’

  He swivelled on his heel to face her. ‘You are?’

  She stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Eden Grey, I’m a private detective, and I overheard that you’ve lost something.’ She lowered her voice. ‘You’re not the only one. Have you got a minute?’

  He looked her up and down, taking in her running clothes and evidently weighing up whether or not to believe her.

  ‘I can come back later with ID if you want,’ Eden said, ‘or you can check with the girl on reception. She knows who I am.’

  He had a brief chat with the girl on reception, who nodded vigorously, evidently glad that the theft was now Eden’s problem. He came back to Eden and steered her into the coffee lounge.

  ‘I’m Will Day,’ he said. ‘What do you want to tell me?’

  ‘Can you tell me what’s been stolen?’

  ‘Nothing valuable, really, just a pair of gloves.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, but the last time I was here I lost a DVD. Again, not expensive, not worth reporting to the police, but annoying.’

  ‘It fits the pattern,’ Eden said. ‘Small, relatively inexpensive items going missing from the rooms. Not worth bringing in the police about.’

  ‘Someone nicking for kicks?’ Will suggested.

  ‘Maybe.’ She noted again the tweedy suit and ultra-shiny brogues. ‘Do you always stay here when you’re in Cheltenham?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Business?’

  ‘Yes, I’m a management consultant.’

  Eden hid a smile. Like hell you are. ‘And your colleagues, do they use this hotel, too?’

  Will leaned back in his chair and regarded her for a moment. ‘Yes, they do,’ he said slowly.

  ‘I’ll do some digging,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s worth your time,’ Will said. ‘I’m not going to pay you to investigate a pair of gloves.’

  ‘I think there’s more at stake here,’ Eden said. Lowering her voice, she leaned forwards and said, ‘You’re from south of the river. I know you can’t make a fuss.’

  ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Still whispering, she said, ‘I used to be one of you. There’s a Hockney on the second floor, near the lifts. The canteen always serves roly-poly pudding on Fridays, but uses apricot, not strawberry, jam.’

  Will said, ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. Now I must get on,’ but when he stood and walked away, she found he’d left his business card on the seat. William Day, Management Consultant. It had a mobile phone number and no email address.

  ‘Gotcha,’ she said to herself.

  There had been no further letters for Lewis Jordan: evidently whoever was sending the poison pen letters had desisted once news of his death came out on Wednesday morning. Eden left the hotel and went home to shower and change, and to prepare for what could be a tricky interview.

  Aidan was grey when she went into his office, and dark circles under his eyes betrayed a broken night’s sleep. She wondered whether it was meeting Nick and being confronted by her past, or the fact that he suspected his ex-girlfriend of murder that had unsettled him. He was frowning at a computer screen when she came in, and when he saw her, he snatched off his glasses and folded them into his breast pocket.

  ‘I like you in glasses,’ she said.

  He didn’t reply. They stared at each other for an awkward moment, before Eden said, ‘Lisa’s here? I saw her car outside.’

  ‘I told her you wanted to speak to her. She says she’s busy with the skeleton but frankly I think that’s a ploy. If she examines it any more closely she could file a paternity suit
against it.’

  ‘In the basement?’ Eden asked.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Lisa was in the lab, the skeleton laid out on a gurney before her. She wore a green overall and rubber gloves as she handled the bones. As they came in, she was holding the skull and peering at the teeth in the upper jaw.

  ‘Rehearsing for Hamlet?’ Aidan asked.

  She put the skull down. ‘I thought the TV people might like a bit about tooth wear and dentition,’ she said. ‘It was crucial in one of the war graves cases I handled.’

  ‘I’m sure they’d find that fascinating,’ Aidan said. ‘Meanwhile, Eden wants to ask you if you killed Lewis Jordan.’

  Lisa blasted him with an icy glare.

  ‘Aidan,’ Eden said, ‘why don’t you go back to your office? I’ll come and find you before I go.’

  He swivelled his head from Lisa to Eden. ‘You’ll be OK on your own?’

  Lisa rolled her eyes. ‘There’s not going to be catfight on the bones, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  With a backward glance, he left them alone.

  Eden dragged over a plastic chair and took her notebook out of her backpack. ‘Aidan says you saw Lewis Jordan on Tuesday evening. Start from the filming and tell me what happened.’

  Lisa sucked in a breath through her nose and looked her over like a snake calculating the strike range to its prey. ‘I left here about six with Aidan. He said he wanted to take me for dinner. He knows I love Thai, so we went to a little place he knows down the High Street.’

  ‘The pub?’ Eden said, without looking up from the notebook.

  ‘Er, yes. We ordered and had a drink. Lots to catch up on, as you can imagine. We’ve been friends for over a decade – golly how old that makes me feel – then Aidan got a phone call and had to leave.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why did he have to leave?’

  ‘You know that.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘The Holy Blood was missing. When Andy Pandy and Weed or whatever they’re called packed up after the filming, the Blood was missing. They called Aidan and he rushed back here. He told me to stay and have my dinner, but I thought it was most likely Lewis who pinched the Blood so I went to see him.’

  ‘What made you think it was Lewis?’

  ‘Puh-lease! Eyes as big as millwheels when he looked at it. He believed all that shit about it making people immortal.’

  ‘So you went to see him? When was this?’

  ‘Nearly seven.’ That tallied with the CCTV. Eden had instantly recognised that sprightly figure trotting up the steps to Lewis’s hotel. ‘He wasn’t in so I had a drink in the bar then tried his room again. That was about half seven. We talked about the documentary – he said I could have my own series. Lisa Greene Investigates. Cold cases from history, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Maybe a syndicated series with the US but he —’

  ‘I meant what else did you and Lewis do, in his hotel room?’

  ‘We had a drink. He rang down to the bar.’

  ‘What did you drink?’

  ‘I had a vodka and tonic, he had a red wine.’

  Eden looked up. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ A tetchy note crept into Lisa’s voice.

  ‘What time did you leave?’

  ‘About half past eight.’

  ‘How did you pinch the Blood?’ Eden asked.

  ‘I searched his jacket pockets while he was ringing room service. No Blood, so I went into the bathroom and hunted through his washbag. It was hidden in there, so I pocketed it.’

  ‘Did you see Lewis’s eye drops?’

  ‘There was one bottle in his jacket – I thought it was the Holy Blood at first. There was another bottle in the bathroom.’

  ‘Did he use his drops while you were with him?’

  ‘Yes, the bottle in his jacket.’

  ‘And how did he seem?’

  Lisa put her head on one side. ‘Excited, and a bit mischievous. His phone kept on ringing and sometimes he just refused to answer it and at others he answered and told whoever it was he’d be there in his own good time.’

  ‘Who was calling him?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Anything else spring to mind?’

  ‘When I first went in, he was a bit distracted. He told me someone was sending him poison pen letters and he’d just picked up another one. He showed it to me – it wasn’t nice.’

  ‘What did it say?’ Eden asked.

  ‘“Ready to die, sick boy?”.’

  ‘Just that?’

  Lisa nodded.

  ‘And what did he do with it?’

  Lisa shrugged. ‘Put it back in the envelope and left it on the table. His phone started ringing about then and that seemed to cheer him up. When he switched off his phone he said “filthy lucre” and sort of laughed to himself.’

  ‘The envelope was left on the table?’

  ‘Yes. Is it important?’

  Eden closed her notebook and snapped the elastic around it. ‘Might be,’ she said. When she discovered Lewis’s body on Wednesday morning, there was no envelope on the table, and the letter Lisa described had the same message as the one she’d found charred in a bin in the park. Who had taken it, and were they the last person to see Lewis alive?

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Friday, 30 October 2015

  09:47 hours

  Mandy hovered in the doorway, clutching a notebook. Her sallow cheeks were tinged pink with excitement.

  ‘You know you asked me to check out the Catholic families around Hailes?’ she said. ‘I found something.’

  Aidan capped his fountain pen. ‘Good stuff, Mands. What have you got?’

  Mandy sidled into his office and closed the door behind her. She dropped into the chair opposite and flicked her plaits over her shoulder. For a moment he had the impulse to urge her to cut her hair, get rid of those little-girl plaits with their frizzled ends and to chuck away the unnaturally bright hair dye. Then again, it would probably be construed as sexual harassment, and there was enough sexual tension curdling the team right now.

  Mandy plonked her notebook on his desk and hunched over it, crowding his space. He leaned back in his chair, trying hard not to flinch.

  ‘I’ve mapped out the locations of known Catholic families,’ Mandy began, tugging out a map and unfolding it on the desk. ‘Obviously I can only find the big families, but you can see there were a few of them in the area. The biggest one was Coughton, but there was also a family called Ashford, who lived a few miles from Winchcombe.’

  ‘Not far from Hailes,’ Aidan added, scouring the map. ‘Is the house still there?’

  Mandy shook her head. ‘House was demolished after the First World War. But I did find this.’

  She produced an old black and white photograph of a manor house: medieval at the core, and much altered and extended by subsequent generations. ‘This was it.’

  He tugged at his lip while he thought. ‘What happened to the records? Account books, letters, diaries?’

  ‘Not sure, but I can find out.’

  ‘Please. Anything else?’

  Mandy’s face brightened. ‘You said to search a twenty-mile radius, but I extended it because Coughton was so important. Anyway, there’s a reference to Hailes in the Coughton papers.’

  ‘Really? The garden plan I saw yesterday was from Coughton, but it was copying a garden at Hailes.’

  ‘Just a brief mention, but there might be more.’ Mandy checked her notes. ‘Coughton was a bit of a vortex for plots over the years, and hosted several Catholic priests. It’s got a number of priest holes for them to hide in. There’s a letter that suggests a priest from Hailes visited Coughton and hid in one of them for over a week.’

  Aidan thought of being enclosed, shut in the tiny space, scared to breathe in case you gave yourself away, and went cold. Being squashed in the drainage tun
nel at Hailes had freaked him out. It gave him a new respect for the sort of faith that enabled men to put their lives on the line for something they believed in.

  ‘When was this?’ he asked.

  Mandy ran her finger down the page. ‘1568.’

  ‘Any mention of who the priest was?’

  ‘No, too dangerous, I guess, if the letter was intercepted. All it says is that the priest was formerly a monk at Hailes, and he came to Coughton to minister to the family.’

  Aidan picked up his fountain pen and doodled a swan on his notepad. ‘Doesn’t sound like our skeleton, does it?’

  ‘Not really. The skeleton probably wasn’t a monk. Knees not flat enough for a start.’ She tucked the end of one of her plaits into her mouth and sucked it. ‘Want me to keep on digging?’

  ‘You have the time?’

  ‘Sure.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘There’s just something about that garden plan that’s set bells ringing.’ He shrugged. ‘Probably not connected to the skeleton at all, but I’m just intrigued.’

  Mandy nodded. A seasoned archaeologist herself, she understood how powerful instinct could be, however much she swore allegiance to science. ‘I’ll see what I can find,’ she said.

  The new TV producer arrived at ten o’clock. Pamela Salway was tall and slender, with piercing blue eyes and a single diamond ring of about four carats on her middle finger. In her fifties, she wore a sapphire blue hobble skirt and a black biker jacket, and used a ring binder and pen rather than a smartphone, Aidan was reassured to see. She had a calm, business-like manner and got straight down to work.

  ‘We’ve got footage of the examination of the skeleton and of the Holy Blood, but we’ll reshoot the material where Lewis is visible,’ she said in a deep, musical voice. ‘And I’m not happy about this druid angle. A lot of tosh if you ask me,’ she added in a stage whisper to Aidan, who warmed to her instantly. ‘I don’t know what these silly young girls were thinking of, letting him get away with it. I know Lewis was into the sensational, God rest him, but I’d rather focus on the science and the history.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Aidan said. ‘We’ve got the isotope analysis results, which Mandy can talk you through.’