‘Please come in. As you can imagine, he’s distressed with the confirmation that the body is that of his brother. I’ll get you both something warm to drink, and then Clive will join us in the main room.’
After Kim Fairweather had left and Tremayne and Clare were sitting down, Tremayne quizzed Clare on her friendship with Grantley’s PA. ‘Have you known her long?’
‘Nine months, ever since I took up yoga. And no, I didn’t know she was his PA,’ Clare replied. ‘I knew she worked for the council, and I told her I was a police officer, but apart from that, our conversations were trivial. No one goes to yoga to recount their daily stresses. It’s all about letting go, calming the inner demons, cleaning the mind of unnecessary baggage.’
‘Maybe I could do with some of that,’ Tremayne said as Kim re-entered the room with the tea. Not an old metal tray with well-worn and grimy mugs like the security team up near Stonehenge. This time it was bone-china, a silver tray and a selection of biscuits.
Grantley entered the room and sat close to the fireplace again. He was flustered, red in the face. ‘I can’t say that I cared much for my brother when he was alive, but now…’
‘It’s an understandable reaction,’ Tremayne said. ‘Reliving the good times, minimising the bad. We’re sorry that our suspicion proved positive.’
‘Don’t be. Richard was either going to fly high or crash spectacularly. It’s obvious which one proved to be true.’
‘Then we need to understand your state of mind at this time, also what you intend to do.’
‘Am I a suspect?’
‘So far, we’ve no proof of murder. Only that your brother’s body was buried in the side of the burial mound. There must be foul play, but proving murder is another thing. But yes, you must be a suspect, but there’s no proof, very little of anything.’
‘What do you want from me?’ Grantley asked. Kim Fairweather had given him a cup of tea. His hand was shaking perceptibly, spilling the tea onto one trouser leg. No one said anything. Kim handed him a tissue.
‘No doubt the media will want to interview you and then you’ll need to address the council. We’d only ask that you keep it factual, no mention of murder as that’s a variable at this time.’
‘I’ll need to take legal advice.’
‘That’s your prerogative,’ Tremayne said. ‘One issue. It may be a long shot here, but whoever was responsible for burying your brother’s body, murder or otherwise, and I’m assuming it’s not you, may have a vendetta against the Grantley family. One member dead, another one prominent, it brings forward the premise that you may be a target of retribution or death.’
‘I don’t see why,’ Grantley said. ‘I saw my brother infrequently, sometimes here, sometimes in London, and we never discussed what he did, not in detail anyway. Sometimes he needed money, other times he was staying at five-star hotels, a chauffeur-driven limousine waiting for him.’
‘Why didn’t you question him?’
‘I suspected that some of his money-making activities were, if not illegal, probably sailing close to the wind. I preferred not to know, although he was still my brother. I didn’t like him particularly, but I couldn’t detach myself from him totally.’
‘There are more personal questions. Are you okay with Miss Fairweather being here?’ Clare asked.
‘If you don’t mind, Kim,’ Grantley said. ‘I know what’s coming. It may be best if you head back to the office, field whoever’s calling, set up interviews if you must and draft a statement for me. We’ll go through it later.’
With the PA out of the house – Clare checked to make sure – Tremayne recommenced his interview of Grantley. ‘There is, or was, a wife, a Mrs Clive Grantley. Is that correct?’
‘Briefly, but that was before I last saw my brother. We married young, and she was a good woman, wanted more than I could give. The marriage floundered, and we divorced. No more to it than that. I’ve not seen or heard from her in years. A brief meeting once, a hope of a reconciliation, but it came to nothing. I’m not a social person, she was. She wanted to party, I wanted to stay at home.’
‘We will need to interview her.’
‘If you can find her, that is, and how is she relevant?’
‘Your point is taken,’ Tremayne said, knowing that he could be talking to a murderer. ‘However, what is relevant? We have nothing to go on, only the fact that your brother did not bury himself in that mound and pack the soil around him. A criminal act has been committed. Now, whether it’s murder or manslaughter or he died during some bizarre sexual activity, we don’t know. We can’t leave the case open when the guilty parties are still alive, whatever the crime is. We owe it to your brother, we owe it to the community to give the man justice.’
‘Allowing for that fact, I’ll accede to your concern, but I’m afraid that you might be opening a can of worms, raising the spectre of intrigue and violence, and no doubt severe embarrassment for some, for people whose reactions may be unfortunate.’
‘Are you intimating yourself?’ Clare asked.
‘Believe me,’ Grantley said, ‘I’m an innocent in this matter, but Richard went around with some shady characters from time to time. People that you would rather not mess with.’
‘Criminals?’
‘Gangsters, some government sanctioned.’
‘Espionage?’
‘I’m hypothesising. Richard’s moral compass would not have drawn the line as clearly as you and I about what was right or wrong.’
‘Just one thing before we go,’ Tremayne said. ‘A list of where you met your brother, the times he was in Salisbury, your wife’s last known address, and anything unusual that you can remember from back around the time when your brother died.’
‘I’ll be in the office with Kim. I’ll draft a document with her and email it to you within the next twelve hours. And yes, I’ll be granting interviews to a few select media outlets and addressing the local council of which I’m the mayor. I will be careful about what I say. Whatever the reason for my brother being in that mound, I want to know the truth as much as you do.’
Chapter 9
‘Sitting there staring into space isn’t going to help,’ Clare said. She had seen Tremayne in his office, weighing up what they had, what they didn’t have. She knew that her boss wasn’t the man to sit still for long, and a sarcastic comment never went amiss.
‘It’s a confusing case, this one,’ Tremayne’s reply.
‘It’s murder, it must be.’
‘I’d agree, but who and why? And why was Richard Grantley in Salisbury, one time at the gentlemen’s outfitters, another time having his body stuffed into the side of a burial mound, and more importantly, how come I can’t ever remember meeting him?’
‘If he didn’t frequent the local pubs or the horse races, or even more pertinently the police station, then you and he may have gone separate ways. There are still people you don’t know in Salisbury, aren’t there?’
‘Some, but the Grantley family held some sway here. I can vaguely remember the father, an upright man with an ex-fighter-pilot moustache.’
‘Was he?’
‘He was active on the council, involved with the cathedral. Apart from that, I can’t remember talking to him, although I was only a lowly beat officer, and then a sergeant. It was always the moustache that people remembered, as well as the fact that he had a brush with the law at one stage.’
‘Serious?’
‘You can check it out. He wanted to develop some land out at Harnham. According to the local conservationists, there were some rare ducks. One day there was a protest and George Grantley, that was the father’s name, came out to it and ripped down one of the banners. One of the conservationists, an avowed pacifist, hit Grantley square in the face with a clenched fist, broke the man’s nose.’
‘Then what?’
‘Grantley pummelled the man, laid him out cold. It came up in court that Grantley was ex-military, not a fighter pilot, an army officer and former army middle
weight boxing champion.’
‘What was the result of the court case?’
‘A caution for the protester and George Grantley. It was the most excitement the city had had for some while.’
‘The ducks?’
‘They either flew away, or they ended up on someone’s plate, wrapped in bacon.’
‘That’s dreadful,’ Clare said.
‘That’s life.’
‘But Clive Grantley portrays himself as an honest man.’
‘And no doubt he is, mostly. George Grantley was a man easily driven to violence. His son, Clive that is, may be of the same ilk, although personally I don’t think he’s involved here.’
‘Think or know?’
‘You’re right, Yarwood. I don’t know, and that’s a concern. If we take Clive at face value, and accept that he didn’t kill his brother, then who do we have?’
‘Nobody, and have we considered how the body was placed in the burial mound and by who? Not yet, we haven’t. Could it be tied in with pagan religion, somehow signifying a fertility rite or a sacrifice to a god for a good harvest?’
‘Yarwood, no more of that nonsense. We had enough of that when Harry Holchester died. Sorry about that,’ Tremayne said, remembering that in spite of the years since the death of Clare’s fiancé, the emotional hurt still remained.
‘Time heals. Don’t worry about it.’
Tremayne could see in his sergeant’s face that neither of the sentences she had spoken was true. He felt a pang of regret at his insensitivity.
‘Clive Grantley’s wife, any luck?’ Tremayne said. Activity was best to divert his sergeant away from reminiscing about the past. ‘What do we know of her?’
‘Married at twenty-three, the same age as Clive. They lived in London for several years before separating and then divorcing. That information wasn’t too difficult to find out, although where the woman is now is unknown.’
‘Was a reason given for the divorce?’
‘They divorced in 1995 after eight years of marriage, although separated for three. The divorce was uncontested by both parties. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 decreed that “no-fault” divorce was allowed.’
‘Did they divorce before or after Richard Grantley’s death?’
‘A long time before.’
‘No ménage à trois, then?’
‘Inspector, I think you’re getting carried away there,’ Clare said.
‘It’s a possibility, even so. Where is she?’
‘I’m still checking. But I’d agree that she needs to be interviewed and soon.’
‘Anyone else? What about the report that Grantley was preparing with the lovely Kim?’
‘She’s too young, too pretty for you. And besides, you’ve got Jean.’
‘Just baiting you, knowing full well that you’d react.’
‘They must have stayed up all night working on this,’ Clare said, waving the document in her hand. ‘According to Clive, he last saw his brother at a hotel in Westminster on the 30th or the 31st March 2004. If that’s correct, then that tightens the year of death to somewhere between April 2004 and 2009, if we maintain that the body had been there for at least ten years. Except that three days later on the 3rd April 2004, Richard was in Salisbury trying on a jacket.’
‘So why did Richard go to London? Why not meet him in Salisbury, save himself the time and effort?’
‘The Right Worshipful Mayor of the City of Salisbury still has questions to answer.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Tremayne said, quoting Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
***
The removal of the Bronze Age chieftain once more came to a grinding halt. Not because of problems with the entrance to his final resting place at the bottom of the burial mound, but because the second body had intervened yet again.
‘It can only be animal activity,’ Horsley said. He was standing outside the mound, the air temperature just above freezing, and Jim Hughes, the senior crime scene examiner, was not prepared for the cold of the place.
‘We have to thank you for contacting us. Judging by the excitement around here, the curious onlookers, the media, you’ve found something of great significance,’ Hughes said. He was pacing up and down on the spot, attempting to keep warm.
‘Often, it’s badgers that destroy these sites, but there are other creatures, and the compacted soil either collapses from their tunnelling or is weakened sufficiently that a major downfall of rain causes the integrity of the burial to be destroyed. It was only as we were finally removing the soil around our skeleton that we saw it.’
‘We thought we had completed our investigation up here, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.’
‘It’s what we agreed. You’d not disturbed the chieftain, and if we found anything, we’d call you immediately, which is what we’ve done.’
Over to one side, the security guards were conversing with the additional uniformed police brought in to re-establish the crime scene, to move the onlookers further back, to ensure the media did not intrude. Horsley, as did Hughes, knew that the removal of the ancient man now had another complication. A weapon had been found underneath a previously unmoved area of soil, and it wasn’t old.
‘One of my people will need to go in with you. Is that acceptable?’ Hughes asked, out of courtesy. It was a crime scene, and one of the crime scene team was going in regardless.
Horsley realised that a reply in the negative would serve no purpose and besides he was a civically-minded person, although he was sporting a black eye, the result of his wife paying an unscheduled visit to the site after seeing the cosy exchange between the man and his assistant via television footage from the site.
‘Someone small, light if possible,’ Horsley said.
Forty minutes later, long enough for Tremayne and Clare to cut short their meeting with Grantley and get out to the crime scene, Sue Boswell and Maggie Carswell, a diminutive crime scene examiner, entered the burial chamber.
Maggie carefully eased herself around the small area, Sue watching her every move, careful to ensure that the site was not compromised. Maggie took out an evidence bag and put the weapon inside. With little more to do, she passed the bag outside to another examiner. She then returned inside and helped Sue to gently ease the skeleton of the chieftain onto a metal sheet, attempting to maintain it in one piece, an impossibility given the condition of what remained after so many years.
Once the skeleton was outside of the tunnel, the two women remained, one to look for ancient artefacts, the other for more modern.
Outside there was a sense of excitement, with Horsley fussing over what had been recovered and the police officers and the crime scene team examining a dirt-encrusted metal object inside a plastic bag. It was clear what it was. It was a knife, a possible murder weapon, a clue.
***
The visit to Clive Grantley, abruptly halted, was on hold for the foreseeable future. Tremayne thought back to the ‘curiouser and curiouser’ comment that he had uttered before, not sure why. He was not a literary man, and as Clare often reminded him, his only reading was the local racing guide, and even that gave him difficulties in that he rarely picked a winner. His wife who had joined him in the occasional flutter made her choices based on the animal’s name, how it stood, even if she liked the look of the jockey. Much to Tremayne’s consternation, as a man who studied the subject, it was his wife who often had the most success. Not that she rubbed it in, or not too often, although Clare was not averse to making the occasional gibe.
‘It seems we have substance now,’ Tremayne said.
The two police officers had chosen a pub not far from Stonehenge to have lunch. A steak and kidney pie for him, chicken for her. Tremayne in line with his new enforced health regime ordered a half-pint of beer, Clare, an orange juice.
‘Pathology found no evidence of a knife wound,’ Clare reminded him.
‘Not unexpected. If the knife had entered between the ribs, it could have inflicted a fatal wound. The onl
y entry sign would be a wound on the skin and to the man’s innards, a possible tear in his clothes.’
‘The condition of the clothing is so poor neither Forensics nor Pathology could be expected to find proof of that. No point asking them to recheck.’
‘No point, but we will anyway. Now, what about this knife?’
‘It’s with Forensics, or it soon will be. They’ll not hurry this, so no point annoying them for twenty-four hours.’
‘No harm in running past their place on the way back, show enthusiasm.’
‘They’ll need to clean it first, attempt to get DNA from the blade, possible fingerprints.’
‘Not much chance of either,’ Tremayne said, but he knew they would try. ‘What we need is an indication of the type of knife, the places where it could be purchased, an approximate age.’
Tremayne looked at his half-pint of beer, realised that he should not have drunk it in one gulp. He looked over at the bar, attempted to raise one hand to gain the man’s attention.
‘Don’t bother,’ Clare said. She was not smiling.
‘What with you and Jean, you’ll be the death of me.’
‘The opposite and you know it. Look how much healthier you look and feel after you stopped smoking and cut back on the alcohol.’
‘If this is healthy living, I’ll take the alternative.’
‘No, you wouldn’t, and you know it. You’ve got Jean at home for you, and even Superintendent Moulton’s given you a reprieve on the compulsory retirement. With any luck, you and I will be solving murders for years to come.’
‘It doesn’t alter the fact the mind is still young, it’s only the body that’s getting away from me. Let’s get out of here. I’ve had my daily lecture from you today.’
‘Forensics?’
‘First port of call, and then we’ll interview someone. Clive Grantley probably, or else the mysterious ex-wife once we find her.’
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