The Primrose Switchback

by Jo Bannister

  Prufrock had found Shad’s work diary. It was lying on the table, closed, and Prufrock was scratching his moustache pensively. “Perhaps we should wait till he’s awake. There could be something private in there.”

  Rosie just clucked and opened it.

  There was nothing private. There was nothing helpful. Against Wednesday was the single word: ‘Thurleys’.

  “So he’d nothing else planned,” said Prufrock. “Which suggests that whatever happened to him happened after work.”

  “That figures,” nodded Rosie. “If the Land Rover had lain open behind the station for twenty-four hours somebody would have stolen it, moved it or reported it to the police. So he went out in the evening sometime – to meet someone, to buy a carton of milk, something he didn’t need much money for anyway. He was driving behind the station when something surprised him. He got out in a hurry, not even taking the keys, and then …” She blew out her cheeks, waiting for inspiration.

  “To end up in Crewe he must have got on a train going there,” said Prufrock reasonably. “From choice or under compulsion, he boarded a north-bound train. It must have been from choice: why would anyone kidnap him? And why would anyone want to kidnap him in Skipley but change their minds before Crewe?”

  “Perhaps he saw something,” hazarded Rosie. “Something he shouldn’t have. Surprised someone … who panicked and hit him.”

  “And bought him a Rail Rover ticket as a way of saying sorry?” Prufrock sounded deeply sceptical. “And what can he have seen in Railwayview Street after dark? The lighting up there isn’t exactly Blackpool Illuminations.”

  “When I said he saw something,” said Rosie carefully, “I didn’t necessarily mean he saw something. Maybe he …” She hit the language barrier again. “One way or another he knew something was amiss. And he was right. When he went to find out what, someone sandbagged him.”

  “So how did he get to Crewe?”

  “Maybe … Maybe the trouble was on board a train. He went to investigate, someone decked him, and while he was unconscious the train pulled out. When he woke up he got off and found himself in Crewe.”

  It raised as many questions as it answered, but as far as it went it explained the facts they had. If it wasn’t the whole truth it was perhaps part of it.

  “So what was it?” she wondered softly. “That he saw, that he heard, that he … perceived. That made him drive up a dead end round the back of the station, and then pile on the brakes, jump out of the jeep and run straight into trouble. What did he …?”

  “Feel,” said Shad Lucas with heavy precision, as if it mattered. Rosie and Prufrock looked round in surprise. Neither of them had heard him stir; they thought he was asleep. But the bedroom door was open and he was standing there, holding the jamb for support; barefoot, in moth-eaten jeans and a black singlet, his gypsy-dark face drained of blood and his eyes stretched. His voice was hollow. “It was something I felt.”

  He looked he’d fall down at any moment. Rosie jumped from her chair, ready to catch him. He looked dreadful: worse than when they collected him, worse than when they got back here.

  He looked, she thought, as if he’d remembered something that would have been best forgotten.

  She said, quietly but in a tone which demanded a reply, “What did you feel?”

  The answer was a long time coming. He looked at her with his haunted eyes and his lips trembled. His breath was ragged. He shook his head, but the newly salvaged memory remained. His voice cracked when he finally got it out.

  “I think,” he said, “I felt somebody die.”

  Chapter Four

  Detective Superintendent Harry Marsh might have shown them the door but for one thing. Not the big woman’s reputation – he had no problems dealing with the Press, by and large he got as much from them as he gave, he never felt intimidated by them. Not the old man’s evident anxiety, though it suggested that what sounded like a hoax might not actually be one. And not the story itself, which was vague enough to be unprovable whether there was some truth in it or not.

  No, what kept Harry Marsh listening long after he might have made an excuse to get rid of them was that Shad Lucas had a track record as a psychic. The police couldn’t conveniently ignore that just because this time he wasn’t working for them.

  Marsh himself had never called on the young man’s peculiar abilities, though he knew police officers who had and who had not regretted doing. Shad Lucas had found bodies buried on uncharted moor that modern technology and old-fashioned dogs had failed to discover. Asked to explain, he said it was a bit like dowsing; asked how he did that he was unable to cast any more light.

  The first meeting between Skipley’s senior detective and the sorcerer’s apprentice occurred quite recently, and only one of them remembered it. Shad was in the intensive-care unit at Skipley General Hospital with a gunshot wound to his face. It was his curious talent that got him into that situation too.

  So Superintendent Marsh was not fundamentally antagonistic to the idea, as many policemen would have been; as he might have been a year ago. He was prepared to keep an open mind, even if it meant wedging something in the credibility gap. But that didn’t mean accepting as gospel a story that made no sense just because an apparent psychic was telling it. He supposed even a genuine psychic could be wrong or have reason to lie.

  So he made Shad run through his fragmentary account of the night’s events again, this time not so much listening as watching him. The blend of reluctance and distress in his eyes. The jerky movements of his hands. The way he answered questions designed to throw him: impatiently, clearly expecting to be disbelieved, but able to pick up any strand of his discrete narrative without having to start at the beginning each time. People who are lying have a problem with that. They don’t trust their own memories; they need to keep it neat, organised and logical.

  “You don’t remember what you were doing behind the station?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not on your way anywhere?”

  “It’s a dead end!” Of course, Marsh knew that.

  “So you went there deliberately. Why?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Guess.”

  Shad hated talking about his faculty. For years he’d avoided using it at all, even to dowse for water. He found being quizzed on it obscurely humiliating. But he recognised the need and tried to cooperate. “I suppose … I felt something wrong.”

  “Felt?”

  Shad gritted his teeth. “Was aware of. Not seeing, not hearing, not smelling, but still … aware of. I’m sorry if that doesn’t make sense to you. It doesn’t make much to me.”

  Marsh didn’t think he was lying, but that didn’t make him a reliable witness. He could be imagining any or all of it. No, not quite all. Something had happened to alarm him, and someone had hit him over the head, and somehow he’d ended up in Crewe. It wasn’t enough to launch a murder inquiry.

  “This person who died. Can you tell me anything about them?”

  Shad thought, then shook his head.

  “Male or female?”

  His eyes opened wide. The wound below the left one had shrunk to a dark pit in his cheek. “It was a woman!” There was a note of revelation in his voice.

  “All right. Young or old?”

  He ran blunt fingers distractedly through his thick curls. “I think she was young. She was scared. God, she was scared!”

  “What of? Who of?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A man? Men?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Somebody hit you. Who?”

  Shad shook his head.

  “All right, when? Before the girl died or after?” But he didn’t know that either.

  “After,” suggested Rosie. “That was what made him stop the Land Rover. He was hit when he went to investigate.”

  Superintendent Marsh hung on to his patience just barely. “We might make better progress, Ms Holland, if I do the detecting and you stick to
advising the lovesick and careworn.”

  Rosie was harder to offend than that. “You mean I’m wrong?”

  Marsh scowled, then laughed. He was a big, square man of about fifty with greying hair and intelligent eyes and a slightly rumpled appearance. Perhaps because he’d been hauled from his bed before six in the morning. “No, of course you’re not wrong. You’re probably right. But I need solid facts. All speculation and no evidence makes Harry a bad policeman.”

  Rosie grinned. “Fair enough. Well, if Shad’s right and somebody died there’s a body somewhere. That solid enough for you? Though I am merely a newspaper columnist and so would not presume to advise a Detective Superintendent, it seems to me that a search of the station area might yield dividends.”

  Marsh had tried before to dislike Rosie Holland. It hadn’t worked and he’d more or less given up. The woman was a nuisance but she was also astute: it made more sense to use her instincts than to squander mental energy trying to keep her at bay. A task comparable, in any event, to keeping out sunshine with chicken wire.

  He nodded. “It’s worth a try.” He picked up the phone and ordered patrols into the area around the railway yards. “I’ll let you know if we find anything. In return, Mr Lucas, you might tell me if you remember anything more.”

  Shad nodded, cautiously, without moving his head too much. He looked ill. It had been necessary to come here, to report what he’d experienced although he had no expectation of being believed; but now it was done the scant reserves he’d mustered for the task were dissipating like mist after sunrise. He needed to rest. If he didn’t lie down soon he’d fall down.

  Rosie stood up. “I’ll take him home. Call me if anything turns up.”

  Marsh saw them out. Then he returned to his office and, picking up the phone again, asked for two pieces of information: the routes of all trains that had stopped the previous evening in both Skipley and Crewe, and numbers for CID in the towns which were those trains’ultimate destinations.

  If he hadn’t done that, the body of Jackie Pickering might not have been discovered for days.

  With so much heavy goods going by road these days, the trucks that once linked together in great ponderous snakes along the railway network of Britain now enjoy a leisurely semi-retirement. Cattle wagons and goods wagons, flats and tankers – many rotted away in forgotten sidings all over the country, but others are kept in repair and shuffled round the system whenever the need arises. The short chain of wagons sitting in the sidings at Skipley Station on Wednesday evening were waiting for a train to take them to Holyhead.

  That train had arrived, Superintendent Marsh discovered, at eleven-forty and left Skipley, charges in tow, twenty minutes later. It paused in Crewe at one in the morning before continuing its journey west.

  If Shad Lucas was on it when it left Skipley, it seemed likely that Jackie Pickering was too. Her dying blood stained the timber floor of the last wagon. Her body was curled in a corner and might have escaped the casual scrutiny of whoever noticed the sliding door standing open by half a metre and went to shut it.

  She’d been stabbed. A neat job, said Detective Inspector Lewis in Holyhead: a single wound straight to the heart. She’d have been unconscious in a few seconds, dead soon after.

  “A big knife or a little one?” asked Marsh.

  Lewis consulted his notebook. “Twenty-two centimetres long, three centimetres at the widest point, with a slight backwards curve, a bone handle and the words ‘Made in Sheffield’stamped at the top of the blade.”

  Marsh stared at the phone. “Your pathologists are a damn sight better than ours.”

  “The knife was found beside the body,” said DI Lewis impassively.

  The knife was found in the wagon, beside the dead body of Jackie Pickering, aged twenty-three, a television researcher, originally from Nottingham and recently of Skipley. The door of the wagon was open just wide enough for a man to have climbed out. Shad Lucas left his Land Rover in Skipley sometime on Wednesday evening and re-materialised in Crewe at two o’clock on Thursday morning, an hour after the Holyhead train passed through. It took no exercise of the imagination to suppose that Lucas and the dead girl had travelled in the same wagon.

  So, ruminated Marsh, Lucas was drawn to the goods yards – by his own perception or, more mundanely, a scream – and left his vehicle to investigate. He stumbled on the murder and the killer floored him. He left Lucas’s body along with the girl’s in the wagon where she died and made his escape. He may have known there was an engine due to haul them off to parts unknown, he may not. It was a bonus, not a necessity.

  On the grounds that the murder was committed in Skipley, Superintendent Marsh despatched his own Scenes of Crime Officer to Holyhead to supervise the wagon’s return. He didn’t expect DI Lewis to like him for this, but it made more sense to investigate the crime where it happened. He asked for the knife as well, and for the body of Jackie Pickering to be transferred to Skipley General Hospital.

  The Skipley Chronicle came out on Thursdays. It was a busy day for the printers, an oddly quiet one for the editorial staff. It was too late to do anything for this week’s paper, too soon to start on the next. The reporters fell into desultory arguments about whether truth is beauty, whether life imitates art, and whether Coronation Street was more in need of new characters or new scriptwriters. Only Alex even noticed that Rosie didn’t get in until ten.

  Alex got in at five to nine on the dot, Monday to Friday. On mornings like this, when she herself arrived either late or hungover, Rosie would glower and call her a teacher’s pet. But Alex didn’t need to curry favour with anyone: she could have walked out of this office and into any other in Birmingham, and in some of them she could have named her salary. She was a highly skilled, highly efficient, thoroughly experienced secretary whom any chief executive would have killed for. No, she did her job as well as she knew how because that was how she did everything. She took a pride in it.

  She favoured Rosie with a look of cool disapproval. “Good night, was it?”

  Rosie squinted at her. “No. The first couple of hours weren’t bad, but it was downhill from then on.” She explained.

  Alex’s beautiful brown eyes widened as she listened. Instinctively her concern was not for the woman, whom she was unlikely to know, but for the young man whom she did. When Rosie finished she said, “How’s Shad now?”

  “He’ll probably sleep the rest of today. He’ll still be sore tomorrow, after that I think he’ll be all right. I took them back to Prufrock’s when we’d finished with the police. It’s better if he’s not on his own for twenty-four hours and Arthur’ll be more comfortable at home. But I’m not expecting problems. He had a nasty knock but I think he’s got away with it.”

  That wasn’t what Alex wanted to hear. “I meant, how is he? How does he feel about this?”

  “I knew what you meant,” admitted Rosie. She shrugged. “The other question was one I could answer. I don’t know how he feels. He looks like shit. He felt somebody die – stabbed, murdered. Think how you’d feel if you’d seen it, then multiply that by the difference between seeing something unpleasant and living it. The wonder is that he’s not in a padded cell. He’s dealing with it, but it costs him the emotional equivalent of blood.”

  “Have the police found a body?”

  “If they haven’t yet, they will.”

  “They’ll need to ask him more questions then.”

  “He may not have any more answers. Even without being hit on the head, there are limits to what he picks up. It must seem pretty arbitrary to an outsider, what he knows and what he doesn’t, but there’s no point grilling him. He isn’t holding back. You can’t bully more information out of him – I know, I’ve tried. It isn’t there. Like a badly tuned radio: if you’re losing some of the words to crackle, turning the volume up just gives you louder crackles.”

  “I hope you’ll be able to explain that to Detective Superintendent Marsh,” said Alex softly.

  Rosie nodded. �
��That’ll be the problem, all right. He’s a decent enough man, he was listening to what we were saying. I don’t think he knew how much credence to give to Shad’s account, but that’s understandable. A body in the morgue will help with that. But then he’ll be under pressure: people will be pushing him for answers and the only place he can get them is Shad. He may need his friends then. If I have to be away from the office will you cover for me?”

  “Of course,” said Alex without hesitation. “I can keep things ticking over. But maybe you’d better tell Dan? I mean, if all he’s able to field for a while is the B team?”

  Not for the first time, or even for the first time this week, Rosie reflected on the greatest of the many strokes of luck she’d enjoyed in her life: the friendship of Alex Fisher. Alex organised her, supported her, defused the troubles she got herself into, kept her feet on the ground and, if the need arose, would take over at a moment’s notice and leave her free to pursue whatever unicorn had thundered out of the undergrowth. And she did all this without envy or ambition. She didn’t want Rosie’s job: she lacked the thick skin and bulldog tenacity that let Rosie plough through any amount of hostility if she believed that what she was doing was right. In plain English, Alex was too nice to do what Rosie did as well as Rosie did it. But Rosie couldn’t have done it as well without her.

  “Alex, you’re nobody’s idea of the B team. Ask Dan: he’d much sooner have me off on holiday than you. Without me the place runs smoothly, the only difference is there are fewer complaints. Without you, there are more complaints and the office looks like a bomb site.”

  Alex smiled. “Don’t worry, I can manage. Look after Shad. That’s where you’re needed most.”

  Oblivious of the care which went into Alex’s toilette every morning, Rosie gave her a hug.

  Chapter Five

  Rosie half-expected a call from Prufrock to say the police were harrying Shad and would she come and lend moral support. But she was a little surprised to hear next from Superintendent Marsh.