‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope this sculptor chappie keeps late hours even though he is in the country.’
He must have been watching their approach. Maybe he’d picked out their torchlight.
As they reached the end of the path the door to the Owl Hole was flung open dramatically and a small man in a brilliant, white shirt and yellow bell-bottomed trousers faced them from the centre stage.
‘Who are you?’
He had a nice voice, calm and tranquillizing, neither a deep man’s voice nor high pitched.
‘It’s all right, sir. We’re the police.’
‘The police? Then I assume you’re carrying identity cards?’
His accent was cultured. Plummy but educated and not too affected. Eton? Oxford? A public school?
‘What exactly are you doing here? It’s rather late.’ He was frowning.
Joanna took one step forward. ‘You’ve probably heard there’s been a shooting up at the farm?’
He smelt nice too. Oranges, spice, soap.
‘A uniformed officer came round this afternoon and told me. You can’t believe something so horrible would happen out here. And to such simple people. Quite tragic, wasn’t it?’
‘As you say, sir.’ Mike’s voice was wooden. Naturally prejudiced against such types he was schooling himself not to display what the contemporary police force called ‘negative emotions’.
‘Tragic.’
‘May we come in?’
The sharp, blue eyes focused on Joanna appraisingly. ‘Do. Be my guests. I always have a pot of freshly ground coffee on the hob.’ He laughed uneasily and Joanna suddenly realized he was nervous. Of them? For his own safety? He laughed again. ‘If you’re investigating a murder I daresay you’ll be needing lashings of coffee.’
‘I don’t deny it.’
As they entered the converted barn she took a good look at Titus Mothershaw. He had fine, feminine features with ash blond hair that had a suspicious tinge of pink. It was shaved at the back but the front was long enough to flop across his eyes. He had tanned, smooth skin women would pay for and he was short, about five foot three, a few inches shorter than she. And Mike topped him by a foot. He had neat little child’s hands with fingernails carefully shaped into ovals. That guaranteed him a hundred per cent of her attention.
Mothershaw ushered them into a tall, round room, almost the entire ground floor of the Owl Hole. A central staircase wound its way up to the gods and, she supposed, a bedroom and bathroom. The whole was painted stark white, the furniture daffodil-yellow. And from the ceiling was suspended a carving of a Barn Owl in mid-flight. He had done it beautifully, in a pale, sleek wood. But it had been slung too low and Mike bumped his head on it as he crossed the room.
He gave it a baleful look.
Mothershaw ignored the incident except to steady the owl’s pendulum swing. Joanna noticed that the spotlight picked out the outline of the owl and threw a huge shadow against the wall. It was as striking as the actual carving. It was a clever idea, this cunning use of light and shade. Mothershaw’s home seemed larger on the inside than from the outside, an illusion furthered by the white decor, and white-sprayed branches carelessly stacked in the corner, pricked with fairy lights and satin bows. The effect was almost bridal.
Mothershaw gave a self-conscious cough. ‘My little grotto,’ he said to Joanna. He had clearly already discounted Mike as a philistine.
‘It’s amazing, Mr Mothershaw,’ she said truthfully.
He looked gratified. ‘Now tell me,’ he said. ‘How do you think I can help?’
‘How much do you know?’
‘Just that there was an accident this morning at the farm and poor old Aaron and Jack were found dead.’
‘Nothing more?’
Titus shook his head. ‘What more is there to know?’
‘They were shot,’ Mike said brusquely.
‘Oh?’
‘Someone shot them.’
Titus gave the same reaction as Hannah Lockley. ‘So Jack ...’
‘We didn’t say it was Jack. Someone else shot them both.’
The news seemed to shock Mothershaw much more than the original incident. The colour drained from his face. ‘Who did it?’
‘We don’t know – yet.’
Mothershaw’s eyes searched their faces. ‘Was it their gun that was used?’
‘We don’t have the official reports yet but we think so.’
He had difficulty speaking his next words. ‘And Ruthie?’
Mike’s black eyes were fixed on his face. ‘Know her well, do you, sir?’
‘No. I mean yes.’ Mothershaw was still pale. ‘I mean. Yes, as a neighbour, you understand?’
Mike nodded. ‘We understand all right. See much of her, do you?’
‘Just tell me,’ he said quietly, clasping his hands together. ‘Please. Is Ruthie all right? Where is she?’
Joanna cut in. ‘We don’t know, I’m afraid. We don’t know where she is.’
Mothershaw’s eyes were round.
‘She’s disappeared.’
Mike spoke from the back of the room. ‘Attractive girl, wasn’t she, sir?’
Mothershaw stared at the shadow of the Barn Owl, still now. ‘She was,’ he said, ‘unusual.’
‘In what way?’
‘Just not what you’d expect. I don’t understand your saying she’s disappeared. She’s always at the farm. You’re sure ...?’
‘We’re not sure of anything at the moment except that Aaron and Jack were shot and are both dead.’
‘We’ve searched the farm and surrounding land. We’ve been doing that all day. There’s no sign of her.’ Joanna smiled. ‘Obviously we’re concerned.’
But Titus Mothershaw was too intelligent to fall for that one. And I suppose if you don’t find her – dead,’ he said, ‘you’ll naturally start putting two and two together.’
Neither Mike nor Joanna felt the need to reply to that.
‘You have no idea where she might have gone, a friend, perhaps?’
Mothershaw shook his head. ‘I don’t think she had any.’
‘Boyfriends?’ Mike asked.
Again Mothershaw shook his head. ‘Not that I know of.’
Joanna glanced once more at his small, neat, child’s hands. It could all wait until later.
Instead she asked, ‘Have you seen Ruthie lately?’
‘No.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Three weeks ago.’ There was definitely something wary in his face. ‘I called there to pay my rent at the beginning of the month.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘But she wasn’t there.’ He thought for a moment. ‘She isn’t at her aunt’s?’
‘No. Got any better ideas, sir?’
That made Mothershaw uncomfortable. But then Mike Korpanski had this effect on people. His bulk intimidated them physically but it was his manner that crept under the skin. And Joanna knew sometimes it bore results. He was a valuable friend to the innocent but to the guilty he was a threat. The trouble was Mike made swift judgements. And they were frequently founded on prejudice rather than fact. And although so far she deemed Mothershaw not guilty he was, at the very least, hiding something.
‘Is there anything else you can think of about the family that might have relevance to their murders?’
Mike crossed the room, avoiding the Barn Owl this time. ‘You see, sir, we’re fairly anxious to nail the person who blasted this innocent pair to Kingdom Come.’
Mothershaw almost breathed the next sentence. ‘Who says they were so very innocent?’
All Joanna could do was to repeat her last plea. ‘If you know anything, Mr Mothershaw, anything at all that might point us towards a motive for the crime it’s your duty to tell us.’
But Mothershaw wasn’t quite ready to squeal yet. ‘I hardly knew them, really,’ he said. ‘I simply rented this place from them.’
‘Come from London, don’t you, sir?’
‘Yes.’ It was
almost an admission of a crime.
‘So what brought you to this particular part?’
The question relaxed him. He leant back on the sofa, rested his arm along the top of the cushion and crossed his legs. ‘You probably won’t understand this, Detective Sergeant,’ he said comfortably, ‘but it was the wood.’
Mike stood rigidly.
‘You see I spent months searching for just the right place. Old trees, dead trees, stumps and spare branches. I had to have the right sort of place. When I found here ...’
‘And how did Aaron and Jack react to the carvings?’
Mothershaw drew in a deep, breathy sigh before giving Joanna a sexy grin. ‘They thought I was mad,’ he said, ‘to pay the rent, to transform the Owl Hole, to deface their wood.’ He smiled again. ‘They as near as suggested I consult a doctor.’
Mike’s ‘hmm’ summed up his attitude.
Joanna pressed on with the questions. This was always her way. There were certain facts she had to ascertain for the police reports. But the real solution always came like this. Know your victims and know your suspects. Some people, however pleasant and polite they may seem, were capable of murder. And others, apparently truculent, were not.
‘Tell me, Mr Mothershaw. Have you ever been inside Hardacre Farm?’ Visions of the SOCOs painstakingly lifting prints from the porch, the doors, the corpses crossed her mind.
Maybe Mothershaw shared the same picture. ‘To pay the rent.’
Mike leant forward. ‘Had you ever noticed a gun standing in the porch?’
Mothershaw nodded. ‘Ruthie showed it to me one day. They kept it there to scare the crows off. She told me if the police saw it standing there her father would lose his licence.’
‘Too right,’ Mike said heartily.
‘Was it kept loaded?’
‘She told me the bullets were in the drawer of the sideboard.’
‘Did you handle it?’
An imperceptible pause before, ‘She told me it was heavy. I wondered how heavy.’
‘So you picked it up.’ Joanna nibbled her thumbnail. This could be the ultimate cleverness, she thought. By this seemingly frank confession Titus Mothershaw had already explained away his fingerprints on the murder weapon.
‘Did you get on well with them?’ It was too obvious a question.
‘Very well the few times I saw them. In fact I’d offered to carve a model of Doric for them.’
‘Who is Doric?’
Titus Mothershaw threw back his head and laughed. ‘The bull,’ he said.
‘There’s a bull there?’ Joanna was concerned for the officers roaming around the farm.
‘It was stolen.’
‘I don’t remember reports of a bull being stolen.’
‘They didn’t report it to the police. But it was a blow to them. They’d hoped to make quite a lot of money from him.’ Mothershaw grinned. ‘In various ways. They bought Doric with my first couple of months rent.’
‘Mr Mothershaw ...’
He was instantly on his guard.
‘We know you haven’t seen Ruthie Summers for a while.’
‘That’s right.’ He was very anxious to confirm.
‘So when did you last see Aaron and Jack, alive?’
Titus stared at the ceiling as though giving the question long thought. ‘I think it was Sunday afternoon,’ he said. ‘It was hot. Too hot to work so I thought I’d wander across, go for a walk.’ His eyes dropped quickly. ‘I just happened to bump into them. They were starting to cut the hay.’
‘Enjoy walking do you, sir?’
‘Absolutely not.’ His grin was disarming. ‘I only go for a walk when I’m hunting for materials. Unless I’m bored.’
‘Or hot.’
‘Yes – or hot.’
‘But you didn’t see Ruthie last Sunday?’
‘No.’
Joanna stood up. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Mothershaw. I think that’ll do for now. It’s late.’
‘Is the killer still loose?’
‘Yes.’
‘So would you advise me to book into a hotel? I mean is it safe round here? It’s terribly isolated.’
‘Two constables are posted round the farm,’ Mike said without sympathy. ‘You’re probably safer here tonight than you were last night or early this morning.’
Mothershaw shivered. ‘At what time,’ he asked delicately, ‘did it happen?’
‘Sometime around six a.m.’
‘He won’t come back?’
He – so he didn’t think it was Ruthie.
‘I doubt it.’
‘Well, I shall bolt my doors, draw up the bridge and repel all boarders,’ Mothershaw said bravely.
‘One last thing, Mr Mothershaw. What do you think of Miss Hannah Lockley?’
And here he waxed poetical. ‘I think she’s wonderful. Such a character, so active. And devoted to Ruthie.’
‘Devoted to Ruthie,’ Joanna mused, once they were safely outside. ‘Why did he just mention Ruthie? Why not Jack – or Aaron?’
They walked in silence for a few minutes before Joanna shared her latest thought. ‘Some farmers,’ she said slowly, ‘are old-fashioned. They don’t bank money but keep it around the house. What if Mothershaw paid his rent in cash and it was mounting up?’
‘And Ruthie?’
‘I think we should call the helicopter out to help search for ...’
‘Her body?’
Joanna nodded. ‘In this heat,’ she said, ‘it will be rapidly decomposing.’
Chapter Six
Wednesday, July 8th, 6.58 a.m.
As Joanna cycled along the moorland road she was already aware of the rising heat, the melting tarmac, the mist lifting from the valley and the utter peace. She was alone. No one else was stirring, apart from the birds, singing their dawn chorus.
But because of the heat she had a strange sense of unfamiliarity in these well-known surroundings. The grass was scorched brown, not green and damp. The air was hot, the few leaves were beginning to droop. At first welcome, this desert weather was taking its toll on the moorlands.
She rode along the ridge until she reached the stone walls that skirted Fallowfield and she slowed her pedalling to take a look across the farmyard. She was up before Pinkers. The cows were jostling noisily against the gate, trying to enter the milking parlour. The front door was closed, the bedroom curtains were tightly drawn. The house was still and sleeping. Or was it? She could have sworn she caught sight of a face moving in the downstairs window, which then whisked from view.
She quickened her pace and reached Hardacre moments later.
Here too it was deceptively peaceful, the only visible sign of recent events the police car parked in the yard and the huge caravan of the Mobile Incident Unit.
She dismounted, locked her bike at the back and walked inside the empty room, aware of the stillness of the surroundings, punctuated only by rippling birdsong which seemed to penetrate the Incident Room as though nature itself conspired to cover the whole thing up with birdsong, mooing cows, this deceptive rural peace. It would be tempting to savour the deception, sit still and listen. But Joanna forced herself to change out of her cycling top and lycra shorts into a pale blue cotton dress and loafers – far more suitable for her agenda, accompanying Hannah Lockley in the gruesome task of identifying her dead relatives before attending the dual post mortems. She sat down at the desk, flicked the computer screen on and read through the few facts. They were sparse. Little more than bare details, times, the bodies found and virtually nothing helpful in the statements gathered yesterday, baldly, two men shot, a girl missing. She stood up and crossed the yard to the farm. It was seven fifteen. There was still plenty of time before they had to pick up Hannah Lockley.
Sergeant Barraclough was already hard at work. He was a thorough man, moving around the scene of the crime with meticulous care, collecting and documenting every sample. Silently she handed him a photocopy of the strip of photos.
‘This is the missi
ng woman,’ she said, ‘Ruthie. I’d like to know what fingerprints you come up with from the originals.’
He took a good look. ‘We’ve got plenty of prints from her bedroom,’ he said. ‘We should be able to match them up and see what else they yield. Nice looking thing, isn’t she? Sad eyes though.’
‘She doesn’t look like a killer, does she?’ Joanna was aware that she was instinctively defending a suspect – on the strength of a sweet face?
Barraclough had no such scruples. ‘They often don’t look the part,’ he said drily. ‘I’ve met killers who looked more like angels.’ He gave a sudden deep, full-bellied laugh. ‘And some angels who are unfortunate enough to look like killers too. It could well be her, Joanna.’ Still she didn’t want to admit it and watched silently as he lifted some clear loops and whorls from the pantry door with deft skill.
‘Well?’
‘Looks like three distinctly different sets of prints.’ He stuck the sellotape to the glass slides before speaking again. ‘We need to compare them with the prints from the dead men and the ones lifted from the girl’s bedroom. Then maybe we can make some deductions. But it looks as though the only prints in the house belong to one of three people. I wonder what’s been picked up from the gun.’
‘We’ll formally get prints from the corpses at the post mortem.’
Barra looked sympathetic. ‘You’re going, are you?’
She nodded. ‘I should be there.’ They both knew she hated it.
Sergeant Barraclough glanced around the room, at the blood spattered walls. ‘Well I hope we find someone guilty of this,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t like to think of the bloke responsible for such butchery roaming free. I mean ...’ For once he seemed at a loss for words. ‘I mean there wasn’t even anything here to steal.’ He glanced around the spartan room, the worn sofa, the threadbare rug, the ancient television. ‘So what was the point of it all? What did the murders achieve?’
An embryo of a thought crossed Joanna’s mind. ‘Unless the Summers hoarded money.’
‘In this day and age?’
‘Some people still do, especially old-fashioned, isolated, rural farmers. I’ve seen them pay in cash at the market, pulling out rolls of notes.’ For the first time that morning she smiled. ‘A month or so ago I saw an old chap try to pay for something with a ten shilling note.’
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